ATFAQ203 – All Wildcard Questions – Q1. Explain Assistive Technology in 30 seconds, Q2. What assistive technology trend or tool from pop-culture do you want to see in real-life? Q3. What accessibility feature feature built-into mainstream tech do people massively underuse? Q4. What’s a time when low tech-beat high-tech accommodation and why? Q5. If you could fix one barrier tomorrow (tech, funding, training, awareness) which would you pick and why?

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Welcome to ATFAQ (Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions), with your host, Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology at Easterseals Crossroads. This is a show where we address your questions about assistive technology, the hardware, software, tools and gadgets that help people with disabilities lead more independent and fulfilling lives. Have a question you’d like to answered on our show? Send us a tweet with the #ATFAQ. Call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. The world of assistive technology has questions and we have answers. And now, let’s jump into today’s show.

Hello and welcome to ATFAQ, episode 203. My name is Brian Norton. I’m the host of the show, and we’re so happy that you’ve taken some time to tune in with us this week. We’ve got some great lineup of assistive technology questions for today, but before we jump in, just want to take a moment to go around our virtual room and introduce the folks that are here with me. The first is Josh. Josh is the director of our assistive technology program. It’s also the popular host of AT Update, our flagship podcast here at INDATA. And so Josh, you want to say hi?

Hi everybody. Welcome to the show.

Excellent. Next is Belva. Belva is our vision team lead for our clinical assistive technology and has been around assistive technology for many, many years. So glad to have her. And Belva, do you want to say hi?

Hey, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me. And everybody, welcome.

Excellent, excellent. Just a quick update or just some information for our new listeners. A little bit about how our show works. So, we come across various assistive technology related questions, or as in the case today, we’d make them up as we go. But we come across those questions, we try to put those into a show, and then we try to answer them as best we can. We realize that we don’t have all the answers. Surprisingly enough, we don’t have all the answers, and we also ask for people’s feedback. And so, today’s a little bit different. Today we’re going to be jumping into some … This is kind of an all wildcard show. And so, if you’ve listened to our show before, usually the last question is a question that we haven’t had a lot of time to prepare for, but we try to answer that the best we can.

And so they’re a little off the wall, some just thoughtful questions that we try to answer with what our experience has been. But today we’re going to do five questions that are all wildcard questions. And so, we’ll see how this goes today. Maybe this will become a regular episode on our podcast. So, bear with us today as we try this. But as we jump in, there are a couple of ways for you to get us your questions, and then also for you to provide feedback. And so, we’ve set up a couple of things for you. There is a listener line that is (317) 721-7124, or an email address at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Great ways to get us your questions. If you have questions that you would like us to try to answer on the show, please send those to us. We’re always looking for those and would love to include those in our show.

So, without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into the first wildcard question today. And that question … We’ll see how simple we can make this, but the question is, how would you explain assistive technology to someone in 30 seconds? So, let me jump into that one. I made these questions up today. And so, really for me-

You got time to work on it. That’s cheating. Yeah, it’s not so wild [inaudible 00:03:54]-

True, true, true. It’s less wild for me.

Anyway, go ahead. There you go.

Yeah, no, for me, it’s anything and everything that helps someone do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. That’s how I typically say it when I’m up in front of a group, when I’m providing training. Of course, I go into a further explanation, but really, it’s anything and everything. It could be a piece of equipment, it could be a different way of doing something, but really anything that can help someone do something that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do is textbook assistive technology.

So Brian, when people ask me, “What do you do?” And I say, “I’m an assistive technology specialist,” that always gets a blank. It’s like, “What?” And every now and then people will be like, “Oh?” And I’m like, “Oh, you know what that is?” “No.” So, I just think of assistive technology as technology that, as you said, helps a person do something that they could not … I almost want to say the word normal, but I don’t like using the word normal. Independently do. I guess that’s what we’ll say is independently.

Yeah. And Belva, it’s funny, I tell people the same thing. I work in assistive technology. They’re like, “Oh, my brother’s in IT.” And I’m like, “Not IT.”

No.

No, it’s not the same thing.

No.

I mean, assistive technology to someone in 30 seconds, I could talk fast, so I could probably get a lot in there. But really, I mean, going along with what you guys said, and Belva, you said something important, because I usually work the word independence in there. It’s tools or technology that helps individuals with disabilities be more independent, because I think that can open up the conversation to, it can be staying in the home, it can be work, it could be school, it can be, I don’t know, playing video games, or even sports. It could be all kinds of different things. So really just kind of opening up that door.

So yeah, I think there’s a lot of different ways you can go with it, but it does usually need a little bit more explanation, I’m sure, for most folks, but I feel like that at least opens the doors. People can be like, “Oh, neat, tell me more.” And it seems like most of the time people, most folks, it piques their interest and they’re like, “Well, I didn’t even know those things were out there. That’s pretty cool.”

Right. And I think in our roles anyway, for us assistive technology is something that’s going to help an individual be able to either get their education or get or keep their job. I usually throw that in there too, because we don’t really have the pleasure of helping individuals do things like gaming. And I know a lot of times we will get those kind of questions about helping make things accessible in the gaming world or whatever.

And I would be the first one to admit, I really have no clue how to make something adaptable in the gaming world. But if you say to me, “Hey,” well, in fact, I don’t know how much you want me to elaborate here, Brian, but I do recall being in line at a restaurant one time, a fast food place where a young lady in a wheelchair was taking orders. And one of the things that she was doing on top of taking orders was getting the cups for people to get their drinks, and they weren’t really very accessible for her. And so I said to her kind of quietly, “Hey, if they would just move that over here and bring it down a little bit, you’d be able to reach those cups a whole lot easier.” And she’s like, “I’m going to tell my boss that.” And then I thought to myself, “Yeah, I just kind of did an accommodation just standing here in line observing.”

Right, right. Well, Josh, you mentioned earlier, or maybe it was you, Belva, when people ask me what I do, I’m an assistive technology specialist, I think it takes a lot longer to explain what that is than it takes to explain what assistive technology is, because I feel like an assistive technology specialist, we’re a little bit of a Swiss Army knife, a little bit about computers, a little bit about IT. You’re not an IT professional, but you know a little bit about it. You’re a little bit of an engineer, you’re a little bit of this, that or the other. And you just have to be a creative soul really, looking at something creatively. And so, it does take more time.

And I can’t tell you how many times I get asked that question, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I still don’t, other than what I said about, “This is what assistive technology is,” when I try to explain what I do, I never feel like I am fully able to tell people what I do in a way that makes sense to them. They’re always like, “Oh, well, that’s interesting,” kind of a thing.

Yep, yep.

And Brian, maybe that’s a question for next time. What makes a good AT specialist? You know what I mean? Or maybe something like that might be a fun … Not today, because now we know the questions, so [inaudible 00:08:49] qualify. But yeah, maybe sometime that’d be something good to have on there.

I love it. Love it. Well, hey, I would love to open this up to our listeners. If you could tell us how you explain assistive technology to someone who may not have any experience with it whatsoever, be able to explain it in 30 seconds or less, we’d love to hear what you would say to other people? You can give us a call on our listener line, that’s (317) 721-7124, or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thank you so much.

All right, so our next question is, what assistive technology trend or tool from pop culture, that could be movies, TV, or sci-fi, would you actually want to see in real life?

So, this one, I don’t know if it’s assistive technology, but man, if we had teleporters, imagine how many more people we could see, Belva. If we didn’t have to drive anywhere and you could just be like, “All right, I want to be in Elkhart,” and you’re there and then, “Whoop, all right, I want to get back.” Voop. Now granted, they’re going to have to get really good at it before I let somebody scramble my molecules and send them to another place.

Seriously.

Yeah, I do not want to test case that one. I don’t know if that’s really assistive technology, but man, it would sure solve the transportation problem, which is a challenge for a lot of individuals with disabilities. But I don’t know. I’d have to worry if I was in a wheelchair, most airlines break them and mess them up. So, I think a teleporter, I don’t know if I’d trust that either.

And I guess another one that I would love to see, and Brian, as we were kind of talking about this, but the Ironman suit would be pretty darn nice.

Oh, yeah.

Just because I feel like that could really, I don’t know, help out with a lot of different barriers. If you had any sort of physical challenges or anything like that, I feel like the suit could do that. Any sort of cognitive impairment, I feel like it can make up for those kind of things as well. I mean, you wouldn’t have to have it shoot lasers and fly around and everything, but I feel like it could still do quite a bit of stuff to jump in there and be able to just run around and do whatever you really wanted and maybe have some other assistants, sighted assistants, other kind of assistants.

And then my final one would be from Star Wars, whenever they called somebody they had that little hologram. If they had holographic ASL interpreters, I think that’d be neater and all get out. You know what I mean? This little bloop, they just popped up and you always had an interpreter, so they didn’t have to travel. Or if you didn’t have one, you could just turn them on and they’d pop up there and be able to interpret ASL for you would be pretty darn cool.

That would be really cool if they could just push a button and pop up a … Yeah. Yeah.

You set your phone down. There’s pop up there and can talk back and forth and translate and everything else. Because I know they’ve tried translation gloves and stuff, and that’s great, but how do I talk back? You know what I mean? If it sits there and reads the person signs to me, that’s awesome. I can understand what all they’re saying, but then when I want to communicate back I’m still in the same boat, I have no idea. So, I think that might be kind of helpful. So, those would be the ones I’d love to see. I’m sure I’ll think of 25 more, but the ones off the top of my head, those are the ones that come to mind.

Awesome. So, for me, there are two. Both of them are from Star Trek. There’s the universal real-time translator, that’s that little device that they stick in their ear. And so when they’re speaking to someone who’s from another planet, they automatically understand their language. And I know we have, I’ve seen earbud versions of this, I’ve seen app versions of this where you can speak in your language and it’ll come up in their language. And they can speak in their language, it’ll come up in your language. But again, I just wonder, are they really to the point? Have they gotten good enough where they’re really indispensable, or as good as what I see on Star Trek really? And I would love to be able to see that, just be able to stick something in my ear, whether it’s a different language, or if it’s ASL, that would be also cool too. But really with ASL, I mean, honestly, there are glasses that do those things now and they give you captions and other kinds of things. So, I don’t know. I would love to see something like that.

And the other one, it was also on Star Trek and I always found this fascinating when I was watching the show. The Holodeck style training and rehab environments that they could create, they could walk into a room, hit a couple of buttons, and they’d be put into a whole different space. It was called the Holodeck. And whether you could use that for training or going on vacation or doing any kind of thing, it was really, really kind of cool to see. And so, I would love to be able to, instead of having to travel 6,000 miles to a different location, be able to walk into a room and just experience it just as if I was there anyways.

So, two things that I would love to be able to see. And from a disability standpoint, I kind of think of folks who they’re not able to travel. They can’t go very far, but man, could they still experience what everybody does when they go to these real places? And so doing something like a Holodeck style type of vacation would be kind of fun.

I think, obviously I wasn’t a Star Wars or a Star Trek kind of TV watcher, but I do-

Oh, sorry.

I know, right?

Seriously.

I did watch The Jetsons a little bit, not a whole lot, because I also wasn’t much of cartooner. But I do think a lot of the things that we have seen in movies are out there in the real world for us now. And I just think back, I’m getting older and I’m just thinking back to my childhood. And I remember watching my great-grandmother cook with a wood-burning stove-

Wow.

And the fact that we have microwave … I know. I know. I heard you, Brian. Wow. Most people have never witnessed that, but I’m telling you, I not only witnessed it, but I would have to help make the [inaudible 00:15:03] to get the firewood just the right … But we now have microwaves sitting in our kitchen and in our break rooms and stuff. And so to be able to pop something in the microwave and pull it out in three minutes and it’s done.

A baked potato, a good example. You can cook a baked potato in the microwave in three minutes, and the oven it takes hours. So, I have seen a lot of the things that we’ve seen on TV come to fruition, I guess. And there are still other things. Well, even the Tesla cars, I feel like that’s something that who would have ever imagined. So, there are a lot of things out there already available, some that are still not that are going to be in the very, very near future. I do believe … In fact, I just had this conversation with my grandchildren, my two oldest grandchildren over the weekend, driverless cars. I do believe that in their lifetime, probably not mine, but in their lifetime I do think driverless cars will be widely available and used. Probably will be more like an Uber type situation where you’ll call for a car, it will come and get you and get you where you need to be without a human being operating it. Scary? Heck yeah, it’s scary, but I do believe it’s going to happen.

Yeah. When I started driving, I mean, this has been years and years ago, back in 1988, I was told … Yeah, no, ’88, that is right. ’74 to ’88. Nope, I was only 14. 1990. 1990, my dad told me, “By the time you start driving, they’re going to have flying cars.”

Liars.

And I thought, “Oh, sure.”

Liars, yeah.

Obviously, that didn’t happen, but yeah, we’re getting really close on those cars, that’s for sure.

That’s one thing The Jetsons had that we still don’t have, I guess, is their flying transportation. But I have seen that they are testing those flying cars in certain areas. So, I do believe that it will still happen, probably not in my grandchildren’s life, but in their children’s life probably. So, we’ll go with the driverless and then the flying, I don’t know.

I got to admit, if they go flying, those have to be driverless, because people have a hard time just staying on the roads.

Staying on the-

So, you give them different levels of height, that’s just going to be a mess.

Right.

Yeah, yeah. And I still don’t know. I think driverless cars definitely have a place, have those. I mean, I just got rid of a stick shift four years ago, so I went to an automatic. So, I don’t know. I’m definitely not ready perhaps something else driving my car. I just got used to it shifting for me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do find it fascinating that most of the technology we have today are inspirations from the movies that we’ve seen, or the TV shows that we’ve seen. I don’t know if that just gives people something to aspire to or say, “Hey, we really ought to try to make that happen,” and then they go ahead and make it happen. But it’s pretty cool to be able to see some of those things really come. And maybe in our lifetime we’ll see some of the things we talked about today as well. What I’d like to do is just open this up to our listeners. If you guys have any feedback, or if there’s a piece of assistive technology, a trend or a tool from pop culture that you would actually want to see in real life, let us know. You can give us a call on our listener line, that’s (317) 721-7124, or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much.

All right, so our next question is, what is an accessibility feature built into mainstream tech that people are massively underusing?

I think for me anyway, the first thing I thought of is the voice control, because almost everything we’re using nowadays, whether it’s a computer or a smartphone or a tablet, voice control is built right into it. And I can remember back in the beginning of getting started with assistive technology, voice control was something that was very hard to get done, and not just built into it. It required a third-party application or program for you to even be able to use that. Now, especially in my world of the vision accessibility things, it makes the voice control a little more complicated. So, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with it, but every time I take a look at it, which in preparing for these questions today that was one of the things that I did take a look at. The voice control that’s built into all of our iPhones and iPads, I’m sure that it’s probably also in the Mac.

And I do use a Mac for my personal computer, but I’ve never sat down and really played with it, but it’s just part of the operating system. It doesn’t require any third-party anything anymore. I do believe in order to get it to work right On the iPhone or the iPad, you do need to do a download for some … I don’t know, there’s a file download that I seen that you’re supposed to get to do it, but it’s right in your settings and the accessibility there ready to go to work and use. And it does allow you to do navigation and implement, not implement, replicate gestures and all those kinds of things just with your voice.

And I’ve had plenty of consumers where voice control should have been implemented for them to be able to accommodate or to accomplish the things that they were trying to do, because gestures are not always easy for everybody, and oftentimes for different reasons, it’s not always for the same reason. So for me, I think the first thing I think of is the voice control, and even your Windows computers have voice control built in, ready for you to be able to do things like tell the computer to open up a certain application for you or to close a certain application, dictate all of that kind of stuff. So, that’s my first thing that I come up with is the voice control.

Yeah. And that stuff’s improved so much over the last three or four years. I know it’s always kind of been there for Windows computers when you have Dragon naturally speaking or whatever versions of that are out there now. But really in the last three or four years the dictation on a phone, a smart device of some sort has come so far to be able to let you do macros and other kinds of things where you could just say one phrase and three or four things happen altogether. So, I would agree with you, that is a big time underused feature on a lot of people’s devices.

And people get the voice control confused with Siri, and it’s not Siri. And oftentimes when I ask people, I say, “Did you know that you could do this with?” “Oh yeah, I use Siri.” I’m like, “Yeah, nope. Siri has her limitations. She’s great. She’s wonderful. I love her, but she does have her limitations, and she’s really not …” That’s what I say to folks. “She’s really not voice control. She’s your personal assistant. That’s very different.”

Right, right. For me, the thing that … And I find myself under utilizing this a lot, and I think a lot of other folks do as well, it’s text size adjustments. There are lots of accessibility features on your phone, and I don’t want to discount accessibility features. They’re not just really special tools, they’re really smart tools, and we just haven’t normalized those for people yet. They’re not used to them. They don’t think about those. And that’s what I do with being able to adjust my text size. I mean, ever since I hit 40 I have to wear readers to be able to read anything, whether it’s a book or my computer or those kinds of things. And yet, here I am with my phone, do I ever really adjust the text size of anything? I don’t. And I just sit there and I struggle and I squint and I try to make it work.

But really, if I would just take the time to be able to just adjust that up or down, depending on the app, it would make a whole lot of difference for me. And so, text size adjustments, I would say everybody doesn’t even use that, or doesn’t even think about that. They just struggle with the device that they have. They don’t really try to make it go bigger or go smaller, whatever floats their boat. I think text size adjustments is one of those things for me.

Hey, Brian, turn on bold text too. It’s a light feature on your iPhone or iPad. It just makes it a whole lot better, because I’m like, “Oh yeah, I did all that. I did turn all those kind of things on.”

Absolutely.

This is a hard one, because I’d say some of the … I mean, Belva, you’re right, voice control, being able to do all that and everything, but some of the most used ones I’d say are used a lot. A lot of folks have their information read to them. They, “Hey, read my text messages, read my emails.” So, they may not know how to turn it on in the accessibility features. They may not know that they can do a gesture or something like that to get it done, but they do use that. And then of course, dictation, everybody uses that nowadays for half of what they do. If you read any email or text message, you can always tell who’s dictating and who’s not, because some people don’t check it before they send it and things like that.

So, I have a hard time kind of telling, because Brian, along the lines with yours, dark mode, I have dark mode on all my stuff so that everything’s white text on a black background. I get a lot less headaches from my phone and computer, which I’m on a lot during the day, which seems to help a whole heck of a lot and really make a difference. So Belva, I’m going to go along kind of with what you said, and I guess I’ve got a few, the voice control, but then just knowing what all access methods are available, iPhones, iPads, you can do eye tracking, you can do head tracking, you can do switch control. I mean, if you can move a part of your body independently, you can probably access an iPhone or an iPad. You don’t have to use the touchscreen, you don’t have to do those kind of things. So, I’d say that’s one.

And then on pretty much all the devices, live caption, I think is an amazing one, just because being able to talk and have all that come up as text, having someone else be able to type it. If you are working with someone who’s deaf or very hard of hearing, they can type back, they can have everything you say come up right there in captions and text. Or even somebody who’s just losing a little bit of hearing or in a very loud environment, you can get that information across. So, I think it’s a really great tool and a really great accommodation. I think it’s built into almost everything these days, even into Teams and to those kind of things have some sort of auto-generated captions in there that can really just help folks that maybe have either some sort of hearing needs, or just maybe need that extra bit of context, an extra bit of text to be able to get the information of what you’re trying to say.

I think … I’m sorry, go ahead, Brian.

No, I was just saying, no, that’s a great one. The whole live captions, didn’t even think about that one, but that could be used all the time in some of the work that we do. So no, I love that.

I think a lot of people sit down to a technology device or hardware device and don’t even … They may know that they’re going to have, as you said, Brian, a little bit of difficulty seeing the information as it’s displayed on the screen standard, but they don’t even think about, “I should probably look at the settings and see if there’s anything I can do to make this adjustment.” And I think when you set up a computer nowadays, any Windows computer, when you go to set it up, one of the first things it does is give you the information on how to turn on narrator if you need to, or if it’s … And that’s something that you didn’t use to have years ago. It was like if you were blind or low vision, you knew setting up your computer was going to be a challenge and there wasn’t going to be anything you could do until you got it set up and could get the screen reader put on it or the screen magnifier put on it. Now that they’ve already noticed that that is something that people do need to use and want to use.

So, I think there’s a lot of things that are underused just because we don’t know that they’re available to us. And if someone tells us it is, then it’s like, “Oh, well, where do I find that?” And most of those things are going to be found under the accessibility settings on every device. And I think just like menus go with programs, I think every device has got an accessibility menu anymore. I don’t know of any device that doesn’t have an accessibility menu.

Right, right. No, I would agree. Well, that’s very cool. I’d love to open this up to our listeners. If you have any feedback regarding this question, if there’s an accessibility feature built into your mainstream technology device that you think people massively under use, let us know. We’d love to hear from you. You can give us a call on our listener line, that’s (317) 721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thanks so much.

All right, so our next question is, what’s a time when a low-tech accommodation beat a high-tech accommodation, and why?

I always go back to the rubber band for this one, because again, my experience is mainly with the visual accessibility things, and I have had many, many, many of consumers that will say, “I have, now taking two or three different medications and I can’t tell them apart, and how do I easily …” And there are script talk apps and with our iPhones and our smartphones we can usually get access to those things. However, when the technology isn’t there a rubber band will always work. And it depends on how you do it. So, if you’ve got three different medications, then maybe you put one rubber band on one of them and two rubber bands on the second one, and three or whatever, but the simple putting a rubber band around the medicine bottle is your indication as to which prescription it is that you’re going to … Or if it’s just your aspirins, I mean, maybe you’ve got a medicine cabinet where you’ve got several different over-the-counter types of medications, but what you’re primarily trying to get to more often than not is the aspirin, then you just put a rubber band around that.

Or even with files, I’ve had situations where I need to be able to open this drawer and get to this file each and every time very quickly. Rather than having to label each file in there, then you just use a rubber band on that, or what do you call those little metal paper things?

Binder clips?

Binder clips. Yes. Yes. Also, just a quick identifier, and that’s considered assistive technology, even though it’s just a rubber band or a binder clip.

Yep. I mean, help someone do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian, I thought you were going to go with puff paint. I’m not going to lie. I really thought that that was-

Yep, yep, puff paint on the keyboard.

Because I remember you teaching me the amazingness of puff paint and Velcro, not even to hold things together, but to mark someone’s keyboard so that whenever you had to tell them to hit the control or the option or the insert key or whatever it was, they could always just go right to that, until the point it was second nature and they could find those kind of things. But yeah, because I would say I don’t know even of a high-tech accommodation that beats that one is kind of the thing.

So, I will completely and totally tell on myself here with an actual accommodation. I worked with somebody, went to do an eval. They worked, I can’t remember, kind of an afterschool program kind of thing. But one of the things they did was they had to put out all these laundry baskets for the kids to put their coats and their things in so that the kids kept their stuff separated. It was easier was they got picked up and then they had to pick them all up, put them all back and put them away. And just because of some physical disabilities this was very challenging. So, at first it was like, oh, there’s got to be some sort of little lift system or something that could pick them up, put them in the next one, everything else. What ended up working was a dressing hook. That was it. Just a dressing hook. Worked great. It could grab the handle of the basket, pull it right up onto the next one, pull the next one up. It had enough that you could pull them around the whole room, nothing. That’s all it took.

Actually, I think we ended up taking one of those little … Oh, do you remember Jim, the little scooter thing you had to sit on? It had the little handles and the four wheels, very, very low to the ground. Anyway, we took one of those, put them all on that. She could wheel them around, took her no time at all, caused no physical stress. It was a $20 dressing hook. In fact, I think it was one that was turned into INDATA in the reuse program, so I don’t think it cost anything at all. But anyway, thought she needed something really high tech and really cool. Way overthought it. Just needed something with a hook on the end. And the way the dressing hook’s set up, it’s very kind of soft, because it’s supposed to go with clothes and things like that, so it was very easy for her to use. Worked great.

I love that. I’m looking up the price of a single rubber band, so Belva, for yours. A single rubber band is less than one cent per rubber band. And Josh, I think a dressing stick is somewhere between $12.99 or $15, depending on where you purchase it.

Well, you got to remember, I wanted to build a mini forklift, so it’s much cheaper than what was going on in my head too originally, but overthinking is an issue we can all fall into every once in a great while.

Right. So, mine was a hacksaw blade. And so, I’ll tell on myself a little bit too, I worked with an individual who was at a movie theater. He needed to be able to tear tickets. He had left-sided weakness, or didn’t really have much range of motion or dexterity or fine motor control on his left side. And he was taking these tickets and he was tearing them. And when I met with him initially he was tearing them off in his mouth. When I went there, I think the low-tech accommodation was one single hacksaw blade. He sat at a kiosk as people were entering into the movie theater. We took that hacksaw blade, screwed it down to the top of that kiosk, and he was able to take tickets from those folks, slide it underneath that hacksaw blade and rip up against it to be able to tear the tickets.

Interestingly enough, you think, “Oh, well, that’s not very safe. They’re going to cut themselves on the hacksaw blade.” But if you place the tickets underneath that hacksaw blade, it’s sharp, but it’s not sharp enough unless you actually run your hand across it to be able to hurt yourself, but it would tear those tickets like crazy. He could do two or three tickets at a time pretty easily. And so, a hacksaw blade, and I don’t know how much that costs, but I’m assuming less than a couple bucks per blade, versus what we ended up for another individual doing down the road, we actually worked with a machine shop to create an automatic ticket tearer, which cost us lots of money, because you had to pay for the research and the development on the machine shop side of things, but then also continual maintenance because it kept … Every once in a while that blade that was chopping the tickets was actually going to get dull.

And so, you had to replace that blade with a new blade. And so, $2 every time you need to replace the blade versus a lot of money to replace that automatic ticket tearer was something that was much less expensive. And so, I would choose the hacksaw blade all day if that will work for the individual, so yeah.

Well, hey, I want to open this up to our listeners. If you have a low-tech accommodation that you’ve put in place that can beat a high-tech accommodation, let us know, or just let us know what your low-tech accommodations are. I’d be fully interested in hearing some of those things from you as well, but give us a call on our listener line, that’s (317) 721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Great ways to be able to tell us those things. And so yeah, we’ll look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much.

All right. So, our next question is, if you could fix one barrier tomorrow, technology, funding, training, awareness, et cetera, which would you pick, and why?

Does it have to be one?

That’s what I was getting ready to say. Do we only get to pick one?

You can only pick one.

God.

Wow.

Maybe the next episode we’ll do, your option two for this question would’ve been, but yeah, just one today.

I’ll go, just because Belva’s thinking very hard. So, I’m just going to go with the first thing that comes, I guess. I want to say funding, but I want to say that in two different ways. I wish things weren’t so frigging expensive sometimes. I wish everything was just built in and worked, and then funding wouldn’t even be a problem. And it’s hard to say funding, because I feel like there should just be more funding streams than there are. I feel like employers should provide accommodations. I feel like places should be accessible. If I’m a movie theater and there’s AT out there that can help people enjoy the movies better, I feel like it should be in there, and that kind of stuff. But I think it’s kind of a double-edged sword of, I’ll go funding. I wish that was fixed. I wish there was funding that anybody that needed AT could have it, but I also wish it was cheaper so that those funds could go even further.

So, I think it’s one of those, if those things both happened, sweet. But I’ll go with funding as an easy answer of something that would make everything a whole lot easier and more accessible.

Okay. I’m going to go with technology, and I’m going to go with technology because I feel like maybe before we sit our kids down in school or in a classroom, they should already have been evaluated as to what specific technology they need to be successful. So, when we send our kids off to school and they send them home with, I don’t even know if they do books anymore, right? I think everything’s electronic. So, almost all the schools-

Not in first grade. In first grade we’re still getting paper.

Okay. Okay.

If they have a workbook and all that stuff, I can’t speak, the rest of it’s electronic.

Then maybe it’s in first grade when we sit them down and figure out what technology is needed for them to be successful, to be able to have access to all of the different learning materials that they’re going to encounter each and every year, because we know that’s going to change. And then of course, they’re going to have to be reevaluated as they go through school, because their needs are going to change and the technology’s going to change, or whatever. I just feel like I encounter so many fresh out of school students that have either … Well, and let me go back a little bit and say that I have had consumers who literally just dropped out of school, because they didn’t have and couldn’t get access to the learning materials, and they already had so many other things. So, they just said, “Forget it. School’s not for me.”

Well, we all need to learn, and we all need to continually learn. So, I would just like to see more. And I know we think, and I hear all the time that, “Oh, all the kids in this school get an iPad. Or all the kids in this school get a MacBook,” or whatever. Well, that’s great, as long as that’s what that student needs. And maybe it is an iPad that they need, but they need to be also aware of how to get the accessible features for that iPad to do what they need it to do. And oftentimes they’re not. They’re just given the iPad, and there you go, you’ve got an iPad, figure it out. So, I would say technology, I want kids to be able to get out of high school and be prepared to go into college knowing what technology they need to be able to access the different learning materials that they’re going to encounter as they get their education.

Love it. Josh, I’m going to piggyback on you. Funding, I think funding is key to everything. It’s key to the technology. It’s key to funding. It’s key to the training and the awareness, because without funding you’re not able to research the creation or the invention or just those thought leaders that are out there are dreaming these things up. We talked about The Jetsons earlier and all this technology from pop culture that’s coming true. Well, if you can’t research that or figure that stuff out or design or create that stuff, it’s going to take funding. People have that as their full-time job trying to make this stuff. I also think there’s funding for the things that we do, funding for experts, rehab engineers or assistive technology specialists to come out there and meet with people to be able to help them figure out what kinds of things could make them better or more independent at whatever they’re trying to do.

And so, I think there has to be funding for people who are in our clinical program to be able to go out there and do accommodations for folks, help them think about things a little bit differently to make things easier or more able to be done independently than they are currently. I think there’s also funding for awareness, whether that’s campaigns, whether that’s just, like Belva, you were mentioning, educators or students, are they even aware of these things? How are they being taught?

And that goes back to funding for education. Do schools for the blind have the resources? Do they have the technology, the upmost updated technology for individuals? Are the teachers, do they know those things well enough to be able to provide education on them? All of that thing, I think everything kind of hinges on funding. I do think there’s other avenues. When you think about technology, training and awareness, I think there are some things that are maybe more independently located in those different categories, but funding, I think, touches all of those categories. And so, it just makes sense.

It makes sense for me to be able to put funding into this area, because you know what? Honestly, for me, I’d drive over a few more potholes on my way to work each day if I knew that someone was being able to more independently do stuff in their everyday life, be able to get from one place to the next, be able to work in a job, go to school, all those kinds of things. I’d certainly consider driving over a few more potholes than to see people struggle and not be as independent as they think they could be in their everyday life. And so, I think funding for me is the biggest piece for me.

So Brian, I mean, this is the first thing I think of when … I agree, funding. Okay, we need the funding, but I don’t think that funding is going to fix everything. I think it can help, for sure. But when I go back to-

Well, I agree.

… 2003, when I went to Freedom Scientific to get certified as a JAWS trainer, I couldn’t wait to get there, because I already had in my mind, my very first question for these guys is, “Why does this have to be so expensive?” Because I remember at that time to buy JAWS was like $800, and that was a lot of money. And so it was, that was my first question is, “Why does this have to be so expensive? I mean, everybody can buy a Microsoft Office for $69, but to buy JAWS is like 800.” And he said it was the demand, because everybody needed Microsoft Office, and not everybody needed JAWS, and the research and the development and the support and all that.

So, “Oh, okay, that all makes sense to me now.” But then when I look at today and I say just what we’d said earlier in this podcast, all of our technologies now got most of this stuff built right into it. Nobody’s getting paid $800 because we have a screen reader built on our smartphone, or because we have a screen reader built into our computer. So, was it really about the cost? I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like the more it becomes the norm, the cheaper stuff seems to get, right?

Right. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But we got to get there. We got to make it the number here.

We got to get there. Yeah, we got to get there.

Well, and if you look at JAWS, now it’s $1,200. Now, that’s been 20 years since it was $800. But again, economies of scale. There are less people using needing JAWS because you’ve got NVDA, you’ve got all the built-in, you got voiceover built into a lot of your apps. You’ve got, what’s the, TalkBack on your Android devices, all of these different things. And it’s like the economies of scale has just got smaller for Freedom Scientific, because not everybody needs that anymore. All the other screen readers have gotten better. And so, why would you need that $1,200 screen reader?

Well, in some situations it makes sense. It does have some features that are really nice, the scripting, the other types of things that come with it. It’s a nice screen reader. But again, NVDA for a lot of folks, it’s free. It’ll do what they need most of the time. So yeah, there’ll be a reckoning at some point with certain technology companies on what they’re trying to do, and does it really continue to make sense for people to continue to purchase their product because those products have much more competition with them? So yeah, I don’t know. That’s interesting.

Yep. Yep.

Well, hey, I want to open this up to our listeners. If you could fix a barrier, fix one barrier tomorrow, which would it be? And let us know what you would pick, whether that’s technology, funding, training, or awareness, and tell us what you would pick and why you picked it. So, we’d love to hear from you. You can give us a call on our listener line. That’s (317) 721-7124, or you can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Thank you so much.

So, that’s the end of our show today, but I want to give Josh and Belva a chance to say goodbye to everybody before we go ahead and close out the show. And so Belva, I’ll start with you.

Okay. Thanks for listening, everybody. I hope everybody enjoyed this wildcard show.

Right. I know I did.

Yeah.

Josh, how about you?

Hey, thanks for listening everybody, and can’t wait to see you next time.

Excellent, excellent. Thank you guys for tuning in with us this month, and we will see you next month.

Tech information provided on Assistive Technology FAQ does not constitute a product endorsement. Our comments are not intended as recommendations, nor is our show evaluative in nature. Assistive Technology FAQ is hosted and produced by Brian Norton. It’s editorial help from Josh Anderson and Belva Smith. Receives support from Easterseals Crossroads and the INDATA Project. The show transcript is sponsored by InTRAC, the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation. To learn more about InTRAC, go to indianarelay.com. Assistive Technology FAQ is also a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. To find more of our shows, go to accessibilitychannel.com.