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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Proloquo4text David Niemiejer – CEO and founder – Assistiveware – www.Assistiveware.com
Microsoft disability scholarship http://bit.ly/Nyy8S4
Outside Olympic grounds, Sochi behind on accessibility for Paralympians | http://bit.ly/NywzDI1
Accessibility in Internet Explorer 10 http://bit.ly/NyvXxY
2014 AgrAbility National Training Workshop http://bit.ly/NyuHuA
An Appropriate “Copyright of Way” for People with Disabilities: Permissibility of Unauthorized Third-Party… http://bit.ly/1dEVZUU
App: CamFind http://camfindapp.com/
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—–transcript follows —–
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Hi, this is David Niemiejer, and I’m the CEO and founder of Assistiveware, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
[Music]WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 142 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on Valentine’s Day, February 14 of 2014. You may notice that I am recovering from a cold and have a pretty rough voice this week. Please bear with me as we get through that. I’m feeling better, just not sounding better.
In today’s interview, I’m excited to talk with David Niemiejer who is the CEO and founder of Assistiveware. They do the very popular Proloquo2Go and a new product called Proloquo4Text. Interesting app in the world of augmentative communication. We have information on a scholarship from Microsoft for college students. Some interesting stuff about what’s happening in Sochi and accessibility around the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games. Accessibility tips for Internet Explorer 10. Also in interesting story coming out of the American Foundation for the Blind about copyrights and how that impacts the ability to create described video.
We hope that you will interact with us on our website. You can find us at eastersealstech.com. You can also find us on Twitter @INDATAproject or call our listener line. We love to hear from our listeners, ask your questions, give us your tips, or tell us what’s in your assistive technology toolbox. The phone number is 317-721-7124.
Do you live in the state of Indiana? Are you looking for a funding for your assistive technology? We have a low interest loan program that might interest you. Head on over to assistivetechnologyfunding.com.
Are you a high school student with a disability? Do you plan on going to college? Do you realize the impact that technology has on the world, and do you target a career in the technology industry? In that case, you might be eligible to apply for the DisAbility Scholarship at Microsoft. It’s a non-renewable scholarship for $5000 that’s paid for by the Seattle Foundation on behalf of the Disability Employment Resource Group at Microsoft. I’ve got a link here online or you can go and apply for this, and if you’re a high school student who plans to work in the technology field and you have a disability, you should apply and see if you can get that $5000 scholarship from Microsoft. Check our show notes.
It seems that all eyes are on Sochi these days. Everybody is paying attention to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. The Paralympics are following closely behind, and Peter Ackman, who is a Canadian journalist from CTV National News, has a blog post here where he talks about some of the challenges in terms of accessibility for Paralympians. He talks about the fact that the Olympic Village is in pretty good shape. It has ramps and audible crosswalks, grated sidewalks, etc. But he talks about the fact that outside of the Olympic grounds and in the city of Sochi, it’s an entirely different story. He talks about the fact that at the airport, if you get off the plane, you have to leave by stairs. He also talks about how many of the stores have two or three stairs to get into them, and sometimes they’ll have a picture of a wheelchair directing folks to the back entrance of the store if they are wheelchair users. He talks to a woman who guides him through the city, and she says that these are improvements and they are a major step forward for Sochi. She says that people with disabilities in that area are often forced to stay at home. I think it’s a point that here in the US, we take accessibility for granted, and it sounds like they have some work to do in the Sochi area of Russia. I’ll stick a link in the show notes over to the CTV news article, and you can read for yourself about some of these accessibility challenges in Sochi for the Paralympics.
It seems these days that web browsers are a little bit like restaurants, everybody has a favorite. We see folks using Chrome and Firefox and Safari, but if you’re a user of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10, we’ve got a new article here that talks about some of the accessibility features that are built right into the browser. Some very simple tips for making text larger or smaller, adjusting the font and the colors to make them easier to see, ways to move around the web quickly using the keyboard including a setting that I never heard of called caret browsing which allows you to have better keyboard access to the Internet browser. Also it talks about ways to use accelerators to perform common tasks and gives you ways to pin a website to your start menu to give you easy access to websites that you visit frequently. I’ll pop a link in the show notes over to Microsoft accessibility blog, and you can learn more about some of these accessibility settings for Internet Explorer 10.
Are you interested in assistive technology for farmers and ranchers with disabilities? Well then you need to join the folks from AgrAbility in Lexington, Kentucky, on March 31 through April 3. The 2014 AgrAbility National Training Workshop is going to be held there. There are rooms available at the Lexington Downtown Hilton, and the conference is going to include all kinds of cool stuff including a tour of Cardinal Hill Rehab Hospital and some tours of AgrAbility customer sites and a tour of the Kentucky Horse Park. There will be all kinds of sessions there to learn more about assistive technology for farmers and ranchers with disabilities and great opportunities to network with other professionals in the field. I’ll pop a link in the show notes so that you can get access to that registration link and see you guys in Kentucky.
The American Foundation for the Blind has a new white paper that has to do with copyright law and described video. If you’re not familiar, video description services provide voice narration of the visual aspects of movies and television shows and those sorts of things. It’s a great service because it allows people who don’t have visual access to those materials to get some idea of what’s going on on the screen. However, not only is it challenging to find narrators and find funding to create video description, but apparently US copyright law further complicates those matters. The Chafee Amendment is available to make sure that books and other kinds of materials are accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired or have print challenges, but it doesn’t apply to the audio and visual works that they are talking about. Interesting paper that kind of gets into the nitty-gritty of what’s going on with the law and also talks about the fact that at the CSON conference coming up here in just a few weeks, there’s going to be a session dedicated to this topic. I’ll pop a link in the show notes over to the AFB article where you can read more about this copyright issue, and if you’re going to CSON, check out that session and let us know what you found out and what you learn. Call our listener line in fact. 317-721-7124. Let us know how that session went.
Each week, one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an app worth mentioning.
And this is Wade Wingler, still getting over a cold, here’s my app worth mentioning. A friend of mine recently suggested that we check out an app called CamFind. Unlike Tap Tap See, which is an object identifying program and allows you to take a picture and get some information back, CamFind is a more shopping oriented kind of apps. What it allows you to do is take a picture of something, it get some idea of what it is, and then it’s going to suggest places that you can buy that item or similar item.
I installed it on my iPhone, and I hooked it up to the sound board here, and the first thing I took a picture of was a five dollar bill. Let’s see what CamFind does with a five dollar bill. In the interest of brevity, I deleted some of the audio pauses while the program was doing its job. This audio has been a little bit edited to make it shorter.
CAMFIND: Take a picture, button. Five dollar bill paid back, back button. Search field. Clear text. Dollar bill at Amazon. Free shipping on qualified orders at Amazon.com.
WADE WINGLER: So it quickly figured out that I had a five dollar bill as opposed to a one or a 10 or a 20, and then it try to sell me US dollar related merchandise from Amazon. The useful thing was that I had a five dollar bill. The next thing I took a picture of was my shoe. Here’s what it came back with.
CAMFIND: Take a picture, button. Brown leather shoe. Back button. Brown leather shoe, search field. Clear text button. Share button. My Habit, up to 60 percent off designer clothing, handbags and more. Fast, free shipping. Join now at www.myhabit.com. Related image search, shopping. Reveal shopping results. Shopping results, back. Back button. Shopping results, heading. Heading, hush puppy shoe, Brown, leather for men. $145, shopping.com. Caterpillar Argonne composite toe Oxford shoes for men. $70, shopping.com. Eastland open road, loafer Brown shoe for women, $69.99, shopping.com
WADE WINGLER: So although it’s a very commercial app, it does do some pretty good object recognition and give you some pretty good information. CamFind is available for the iPhone. It’s available for iOS 6.0 or later. It works on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and you can find it in the App Store from Apple.
Just a quick editorial note: during the interview today, we had a little trouble with Skype. I tried to clean that up and edit that up as best I can, but if you hear a little bit of audio funniness, that’s what it was all about.
I spend a lot of time keeping an eye on what’s happening in the assistive technology industry, and I’m always interested in apps, especially those that deal with communication and helping folks with disabilities to be more independence. A few years ago, I started hearing about a product called Proloquo2Go, and it was really changing the face of augmentative communication. And recently I’ve heard about something new from the company, called Assistiveware, that I wanted to talk about. I’m very excited to have David Niemiejer on the phone and Skype with me. David, are you there?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Yes, I’m here.
WADE WINGLER: Good, hey, thank you for joining me. You’re in Europe right now, right?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Sorry?
WADE WINGLER: You’re located where?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: We are located in Amsterdam and the Netherlands.
WADE WINGLER: So I appreciate you taking time. It’s the morning here, I know it’s later in the afternoon there. I appreciate you taking some time to talk with me. I want to talk a little bit about Proloquo2Go, Proloquo4Text, and Assistiveware, but I thought it might be useful if you would start talking to my audience a little bit about Assistiveware and how the company came to be.
DAVID NIEMIEJER: I can do that. Assistiveware has its roots in 1998. Maybe I should go back a little bit further. I think it was 1995 that a friend of mine had a very serious car accident, broke his neck, and was unable to use his computer anymore or do anything with his hands. He was a graphic designer, a musician, and when he had the accident, he was actually quite sad that he had survived it’s because he thought I could never do the things that I’ve always done.
It wasn’t until he realized that with the computer, he could pick up a lot of the things he used to do before the accident. He got an interest in life again. He started by using a head control device, a head mouse, to access his computer and he was looking for good on-screen keyboard. He didn’t find anything that was really what he was looking for because he didn’t just want to type, he also wanted to be able to do things like option, control, click, and those kinds of things in Photoshop.
So I designed an on-screen keyboard for him called Keystrokes which came out in 1998 as a freeware product, and he said he knew some other people who might benefit. I said I’d like to improve it a little bit, so over time I got more and more involved in developing this kind of software. I used to work at the University as a researcher, and at some point I had this choice. Either I make more software and I focus on all the things people want, or I continue with my research. I decided that I’d focus on doing software because it can have a much more direct impact on people than the environmental research I was doing before that time.
That’s kind of how Assistiveware came to be. For the first couple of years, I focused on developing solutions for the Mac for people with vision impairments, physical impairments, but also for people with speech impairments. In 2005, I released a product called Proloquo which was a communication solution for the Mac. It was quite geared towards adult users, people with literacy skills, and it wasn’t that popular because Mac just isn’t the ideal solution to walk around with. When you go into a shop, you prefer not to have to open up a laptop, load your software, and start talking.
So for quite some time, people were saying I love the software, but I wish there was another platform. In 2007, Apple came out with the iPhone, we got a lot of requests for people who said this is a great platform, we’d like your software on that. That was actually the reason that I started to work on Proloquo2Go as a version I really optimized for the iPhone and something that will give people a voice. I also wanted it to be broader than just literate people, so I wanted it to be symbol supported.
It came out I think March 2009, so that was even before the iPad existed. It’s hard to imagine now that the iPad is from 2010 and wasn’t around yet in 2009. Over time, our focus has shifted from Mac products to iOS products, because there’s just a much larger demand for those kinds of products and we see less and less interest in computer based solutions. Everyone wants stuff on mobile solutions come on iPads and iPhones.
WADE WINGLER: Around the time Proloquo2Go came out was when I really became aware of what you guys are doing at Assistiveware. I know that that product has had a pretty big impact on your company and the industry and people with disabilities in general. Can you speak to that a little bit? What have you seen as the impact on Proloquo2Go before we get into this new product?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: When we came out with Proloquo2Go, it was the first full-featured AC [augmentative communication] solution on an iOS device. In many ways, it had a big impact. Up to that time, typical solutions on handheld devices were $2-$3000 and something tablet size was anywhere from $8000-$14,000. What we were seeing is that very few people were able to get access to this technology. People couldn’t pay it out of their own pockets and were therefore dependent on funding which by nature in almost every country is rather limited.
What we were seeing was that there were many people who could potentially benefit from a high-tech communication solution, but for whom it was out of reach, so when we came out with Proloquo2Go, we wanted to have something that if you would combine it with an iPod touch and a speaker case, you would spend less than $500. When we announced the pricing, many people told us, you’re crazy, that’s not possible. It cannot be that cheap. That’s what people said in the assistive technology arena. Of course, when you walk outside of that, people were saying it has to be $0.99.
It had a big impact in that by being more affordable, being on a consumer-based platform, it was very attractive to many families but also to many schools. What has really happened is that it has given access to high tech AC to all kinds of people who never before had access. For example, we see a lot of kids with autism who get access to AC through apps that in the past would not have had access to a high-tech AC solution of the more traditional type. We also see that young kids get access. We have a lot of two-year-old users. About 20 percent of our users is five and under.
In the past, that group of relatively young users, they were much less likely to get access to a dedicated communication device. Even if they did get access, often wait was an issue, costs was an issue, the fear that it will get damaged. What we’re seeing is that high-tech AC is now reaching a much wider audience and that by getting access to this at a younger age, many of these kids that now has access to this kind of communication are able to enter mainstream schooling whereas in the past that might have gone into a special education just because they didn’t have a way to communicate.
Another big change that we have seen is that in the past, professionals were really gatekeepers for this kind of technology. You had to have an evaluation, you need to get the funding, and there was really no other way to get this kind of technology. Now you can go into an Apple store and buy an iPad and go on the App Store and by an AC app. That means that people who in the past were told, you’re told your son or daughter is not smart enough or is not ready yet, they now have the opportunity to ignore that and get the technology anyway. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. Sometimes people don’t pick the right solution. In other cases it’s a good thing because it means that they no longer have to be on a long waiting list and are no longer dependent on professionals who can also make an error of judgment.
It is nevertheless irrespective of whether you find it positive or negative, it’s a huge change in this field where families and parents and AC users are in control of whether they get access to a solution or not.
WADE WINGLER: I think my audience has feelings about that, but I’m a big proponent of the fact that in complex situations, more choices are better. I’m glad that we have those options that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
DAVID NIEMIEJER: And vice versa, it’s good that there are still solutions available that provide access to other things that are not available on the consumer platforms.
WADE WINGLER: And speaking of options, nice segue, you have a new product in this category, Proloquo4Text. I’ve been playing around with it here. Tell me what’s different with this new product.
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Proloquo4Text is really designed for literate users. Proloquo2Go is a symbol supported solution. If you are unable to read and write, you can use Proloquo2Go, but Proloquo4Text really requires a certain degree of writing and reading competence. We designed it based on looking at a lot of Proloquo2Go users. When I travel, I always try to meet users, speak to professionals, go to schools and observe. From those observations, we collected ideas on how we wanted to have a solution that was really completely optimized for literate users.
One of the unique things is that we offer everything on the same screen, in a way. So you have access to typing, word prediction, sentenced prediction, things that you can quickly interject all on one screen. There’s no need to switch modes so that either you have your phrases or you have your typing. We really tried to make this product highly optimized for this particular group of people rather than just bolt more of this stuff onto Proloquo2Go and give people things that they might not need or make the product more complex than necessary.
WADE WINGLER: In my initial exposure to it as somebody who is literate and doesn’t do a lot with augmentative communication, it was intuitive for me when I got it, installed it – I was going to say got it out of the box – when I installed it and put it on my iPad, I very quickly was able to start using it in a way that made sense.
DAVID NIEMIEJER: So we spent a lot of effort in terms of making sure that we have a user interface that is natural to use, easy to use. We also spent a lot of time making sure that things interact well with the iOS. This particular product we’ve been working on for two years. We definitely spent over six man years of work on this particular product to make it really good and solid.
One of the things that I think also sets us apart from some of the other developers is that we actually have a full-time team of Q&A engineers that continuously tested product so that we know that once we deliver it, we have something that’s really stable and reliable which is something we think is very important for AC users as is usually their only means of communication.
WADE WINGLER: Absolutely, and that makes a whole lot of sense. We expect apps to work, and we expect them to work well, but especially those. Speaking of iOS, what about switch accessibility and the new features that came out with iOS 7. How do they work with this product?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: When iOS 7 came out, Apple introduced switch control which gives the user full access to the iOS device with a single or two switches. We have made Proloquo4Text fully compatible with switch control and also with voice over for vision impaired users. In practice, though, the scanning order is something a little bit odd. That’s one area in which app developers do not have much influence as of yet. We do expect that the next iteration of switch control will improve either the scanning order by itself or will allow developers like us to have more control over that. In summary, you can get full access to Proloquo4Text with a single switch using switch control, but the scanning order is not always optimal and exactly what you would expect.
WADE WINGLER: Hopefully that is something that will be improved on the Apple site before too long. David, we’ve got a little less than a minute left. Can you give me just a quick prediction of what’s coming down the road for Assistiveware? What are you thinking about for future development?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Right now, we’re working really hard on Proloquo4Text 4 which will be a multilingual solution, not just English but also support other languages. Then we’re looking at potentially doing some other apps maybe more geared towards special ed and not just to communication. One thing that’s for sure, you’re going to stay concentrated on doing iOS-based solutions. We think it’s more valuable to focus on one platform and innovate their then trying to be on every single device just to conquer the world.
WADE WINGLER: That makes sense. I’m sure people are going to want to reach out to you and learn more about Assistiveware and Proloquo2Go and Proloquo4Text. What contact information which you suggest. What you offer for them to reach out to?
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Our websites Assistiveware.com is definitely the place where you can find lots of stuff, lots of resources, not just product information but also tutorials. If you have any questions, you can always email to support@assistiveware.com and will be happy to answer your questions or guide you to relevant information. Of course you can find our products on the App Store on your iPad or in iTunes.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. I’ll stick those links in the show notes so that folks will have access to those. David Niemiejer is the CEO and founder of Assistiveware and has been our guest today. David, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
DAVID NIEMIEJER: Thank you, and keep up the good work with your podcast.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your assistance technology update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.