Presentations/ITandDisability
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Technology, Abilities and Disabilities
Arun Mehta
www.radiophony.com
mehta@vsnl.com
Stephen Hawking can only press a single button.
Yet…
He writes on his website: “I am quite often asked: How do you feel about having ALS. The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many.”
Ability?
The quality of being able to do something A natural or acquired skill or talent. (source: dictionary.com)
For instance, if you own a car, you have the ability to travel at 100 km an hour
With a phone, your voice and ear carry thousands of kilometers
Education is all about imparting abilities
Disability?
My simple definition: the absence of an ability. What matters is, what level you reach, after adding a layer of technology.
I speak Punjabi, cannot read it. Effectively, I am like a blind person, vis-à-vis the Punjabi language. With software for the blind, I can read Punjabi
Once on the Internet, a person who is deaf-blind seems the same as everyone else
There are as many disabilities as there are abilities: we are all disabled in almost every conceivable way
The Quality Element
People have abilities to greater or lesser degrees (lots of us know English, few can write as well as Shakespeare)
If you are great at one ability, e.g. an Olympic gymnast, that is worth a lot more than a thousand abilities at which you are mediocre.
If you have one great ability, you are incredibly lucky – very few in human history have been great at more than one thing
Stephen Hawking’s abilities
He is one of the world’s leading scientists
He is also one of the greatest non-fiction authors in human history: only a communicator of unique skill can write bestsellers about astrophysics
How many Stephen Hawkings has the world lost, because the local school didn’t have facilities for wheelchairs, or the blind?
Stephen Hawking’s disabilities
He can only press one button: that is the only way he can write
He also cannot speak. He has to write into his computer, then use the text-to-speech abilities of his computer to produce spoken words
For this he uses “Equalizer”, which allows this magnificent brain an output bandwidth of about 1 Hz.
An information technologist’s view of disability
Information is like water
Disability is like faulty plumbing:
Hardware fault, can be addressed via technology (that *is* technology: giving people new abilities)
Software fault, e.g. your brain may not contain the software to interpret Punjabi. This can be addressed via education
Solution lies in combining “hardware” with “software”, i.e. technology with education
Example: Spastics
Often motor and speech disabilities
Because of this, they find it hard to obtain a normal education
The condition is diagnosable at a very young age
If they could use a computer to type and speak, they could attend normal school
Can we make communication software user-friendly enough for a two-year old?
Open Source and the Blind
“Print disabled”: the blind, the illiterate, or people who can understand a language, but cannot read it
Access software for them is very expensive: Jaws costs $900, and is an inefficient approach: first you write “graphic” software, then look for another software, e.g. Jaws, to interpret graphics for the blind user.
Why not take open source software, add a few “speak” commands, and recompile?
Such software could run on lower cost hardware
Computers and the Autistic
"The autistic mind works like a computer.. I've spent some time surfing the Internet, and I found that when I surf the Internet it works exactly like my mind.” – Professor Temple Grandin (http://autism.about.com/cs/adultswithasd/a/computermind.htm)
'My coding just flies' Computerworld, April 14, 1997
Robots and Motor Disability
If a wheelchair cannot climb to your classroom, you send your robot up, with a camera to see, a mike to hear, and a loudspeaker to let you ask questions
People on wheelchairs could have a robot help them share things
How people with different kinds of disability might help each other
A blind person could take a snapshot or video of street signs with a camera phone, transmit it to a special call center, or a friend, where someone (who may be wheelchair bound for instance) tells her what the camera sees
Until such time as the interpretation of the picture or sound can be automated, human beings should get jobs at such call centers
A camera phone can act as your eye, ear, tongue, with suitable backup support
Current Activities
Software writing workshop for the faculty at the National Association for the Blind. After a couple of games we are writing a speaking Hindi text editor
Starting work on a Linux version of eLocutor, with an interface accessible to small children, so that motor and speech disabled kids get an education
Future Direction
The disabled can write better software to address their own needs, than others can
We propose to set up an institute where people with different kinds of disabilities could learn the skills needed to create technological solutions to their own problems, and in the process learn valuable skills.
Students will run the institute under our supervision -- so they can replicate such institutes -- growth is thus inbuilt
Summary
Technology profoundly changes life for the disabled (e.g. a computer makes books accessible to the blind)
Technology (hw) is about creating new abilities, as is education (sw). Combining them is the best way to find a solution
The disabled need to take empowerment to a new level, where they take charge of technological development for their needs
