ATU707 – Morphic with Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden

Hi, this is Gregg Vanderheiden, and I’m the president of Raising the Floor, a non-profit for digital equity, 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 707 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on December 13th, 2024. On today’s episode, we are very excited to be joined by Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, president of Raising the Floor, and he’s here to tell us all about Morphic, and all the great tools it has available to help individuals with computer access. Don’t forget listeners, we always love hearing from you. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. For now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Folks, we cannot thank you enough for giving us a listen here at Assistive Technology Update, but did you know that this is not the only podcast that we have? You can also check out our sister show Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. This show comes out once a month and it features panelists, Belva Smith, Brian Norton, and myself as we try to answer the questions that are plaguing your mind about assistive technology. We gather up all the questions we get during the month from emails, phone calls, and many other means, and then we do our best to answer them. But I got to tell you folks, believe it or not, we do not know everything. So we rely on our listeners a lot to reach out to us and give us some of those answers or maybe just talk about their personal experiences and things that have happened to them.

So if you like Assistive Technology Update, you may very well love Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Again, it’s Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions where you can get your questions about assistive technology answered, or if you happen to have the answers to some of the questions asked on that show, please, please, please do reach out and let us know so that we can help the community with the answers that they so desperately seek. Much like Assistive Technology Update, you can find Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, wherever you prefer to get your podcast. And as always listeners, thank you for listening.

Listeners, our guest today, Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden was nice enough to join us on the show over five years ago, and we are super excited to have him back to tell us all about Morphic and the great ways that it’s able to assist individuals with computer access and other needs. Gregg, welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

Could you start us off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Oh, boy. This is my 53rd year in the field. I started in 1971. And I started off doing augmentative communication. It wasn’t called that back then. That term actually came from something I wrote in 1979. And then computer access and universal design, web access. There’s features from the research team. I’ve directed the Trace R&D Center for 50 years, and there’s features from that in every computer, Mac, Windows, Linux, every iOS, Android, etc. That came out of there. So it’s a team that really worked on making changes to what was available and I also chaired WCAG 1 and 2.

Wow. Okay. Well, we could get into all of that and probably fill up the rest of the year in shows. But the reason we’ve got you on today is to talk about Morphic. So I guess, let’s kind of start at the beginning for folks that maybe didn’t listen five years ago to find out about it. Let’s start back at the beginning and where did the idea for Morphic come from?

Back when I was co-chairing WCAG 1 and 2, but particularly on 2, it became clear to me that we were creating web content that was accessible to those people who had good AT, and if you didn’t have good AT or you couldn’t afford good AT, then it really wasn’t going to be there. And so, we got together with others, and we formed a nonprofit organization Raising the Floor to try to figure out how to make sure that those with the base level or the floor level of assistive technology would have technology that was good enough, raised enough that it would be able to actually access all of the new dynamic content that was coming out on the web, etc. And so, that’s where the organization came from. And Morphic grew out of that effort to try to figure out how do we look at those who are having the most trouble and have the least resources and make sure that they are actually able to access the web, which has now come to be basically essential. It used to be central to our lives, but now it’s essential for healthcare and everything else.

Well, not just for healthcare. I mean, we’re meeting over Zoom. So I mean, we’re using this for communication in so many other different ways. So yeah, I’d say that essential is not going too far to really say that. Morphic has a lot of different features and I want to dig into them as much as we can. So I guess we should probably start with the MorphicBar. What exactly is it?

Okay, so think of Morphic in three layers. But before we get to that, I want to introduce the concept I call digital affinity. And that is the ability to learn and understand technology. And this is not the same as digital literacy. It is a talent. It’s some people can sing, some people are athletic, some people can write, and other people can’t do any of those to save their soul. But digital affinity is another talent. There are people that I know that are blazingly brighter than I am, who cannot figure out how to use their technology. And it’s not digital literacy ’cause I know people who’ve been using computers for 20 years and when the pandemic came out, they could not figure out how to get onto Zoom. I mean, these are professors who couldn’t figure out how to get onto Zoom, but they’re very bright and they’re very digitally literate in terms of using it, but they don’t have a talent for learning things. And so, whenever something new comes out, they don’t just pick up on it.

Now, think of that. All of us that we talk to and are normally in our circles and probably listening to this podcast are at the upper end of digital affinity. But think of the people at the other end. And if we think of just the bottom 5%, the people who have the most trouble learning and understanding technology, even when you explain it to them, that’s one in 20 people, that’s a huge… that’s millions, that’s billions, I mean, that’s a huge number of people that we’re talking about. And we need to be thinking about are all of them going to be able to access and use everything that we’re using as well.

So with that in mind, one of the things we set out to try to do with Morphic was to make it that people who used AT would be able to use it on different computers and their settings would follow them. But we quickly found out that there was a bigger problem, and that was that even the stuff that is already built into the computer, people didn’t know about who needed it, and there’s a bunch of… Microsoft did a number of studies to… they hired companies to go out and do research on it and came back and found out that the number of people using it was a small fraction of the number that would benefit from them.

Many didn’t know about it, but there’s a whole nother group that knows about them, but they’re buried in the control and settings panels, and they’re just so hard to get to that it’s beyond them to try to go and get to them when they need them or figure out how to find them or that’s too complicated. Even those of us with high digital affinity get lost in the settings panels. And if they ever reorganize them, we always grumble because it takes us so long to try and find them again. And if that’s us, think about the people who have trouble.

But then there’s the third group that is so timid around technologies, they will not go into the control panels. Asking them to go into the control panel to turn on an accessibility feature to make the computer work for them is like asking people to go under the hood of their car and make some changes because the car will then run better for them. And with a few exceptions of mechanics and these days, electronic mechanics, everybody’s afraid to go under the hood and mess around because they’re afraid they’ll break it. And that’s exactly what we hear from these users.

You say, well, why don’t you just go in and use this feature? We showed it to one person who came over to us afterwards and said, “Oh, this is amazing. This is the first time I’ve been able to use the computer. It was so much easier.” And we came back and a week later they were sitting at the computer squinting at it again, and we said, “Well, why didn’t you go do that?” And she said, “Well, you can go do that, but I would be afraid I would break it if I turned it on.” And we heard this at job centers and I said, “Oh, that’s just job centers.” And then I heard at the community college, and these are supposed to be digital natives and they’re afraid to go into the control panels because they’re afraid.

And then I heard it at a major research university spontaneously. One of the students we were just talking to about computer use and stuff like that, and they said, “Whenever I sit down to the computer, one of the things I’m afraid of is am I going to break this?” And that stunned me. And then I was talking to a number of librarians who support people who have trouble on the computer. So if you have trouble on the computer, this is one of the people that comes over to help you. A third of them do not go into the control panels because they’ve either been told never to do that or they are afraid they’ll break something and somebody will yell at them. So that’s where we put all the accessibility features.

So one thing that the MorphicBar does is it’s a little icon in the tray and it works on a Mac or a PC and just click on it and it pops a little bar, and on it are a number of features that are all built into the computer already, but they just are out where you can see them. One of them says, text size, but it’s really not text size, it’s really screen scaling. But screen scaling would be kind of scary, so we call it text size. And you click on that and everything on the screen gets bigger. It just rescales the whole screen. So you can take a screen if you’re having trouble seeing it and everything gets larger, nothing goes off-screen. It’s not like a Zoom or a magnify where you magnify it, now half the stuff disappeared off-screen. The second one is a magnifier. You click on it, pops up a little magnifying glass and the mouse works. It follows the mouse around and you can highlight things and use the mouse in magnified fashion with this little magnifier.

The next one is Snippet. And we all know this is the one where you can copy any part of the screen. Everybody uses that, who knows how to get to it and activate it, but it’s hard to find. And if you don’t remember the secret keystrokes or know where to dig around and find it, it’s not obvious, but it’s really great for everybody, but especially for people who ever have trouble on a computer, something pops up, dialogue. They can just select it and copy it, paste it into an email and say, “I got this error message. What does it mean?” I always love it when I’d call up for tech support and they say, “Well, what did the error message say?” And I go, “Oh, I don’t know. Something about something.” And they go, “Well, if you could tell us… next time it happens, if you can call us back.” And they go, “Oh, great.”

Then the next one is one of the most powerful ones, it’s Read Selected and it allows you to select any text anywhere on the computer that you can copy. You just select it and you hit this and it will read it aloud to you. So this is great for anybody with any type of reading disability.

With dyslexia, you see the little characters and they’re kind of jumping around on you and that makes it hard to read and it’s not… some people just say, “Well, if you have a learning disability, you just need to practice reading.” And I say to them, “You’re right. And all of you who have glasses, you should just get rid of your glasses and you should just practice trying to read without your glasses because you’re getting dependent on your glasses.” If you have dyslexia, it doesn’t go away with practice. So this is not only a barrier to you doing anything or learning anything, but think about writing. Have you ever written an email where you didn’t go back and correct it or where you wouldn’t go back and read it? Because if you sent it out and you had a bunch of typos and spelling errors in it, you don’t think it’s going to give a very good impression to your boss?

Well, if you have dyslexia and the letters are jumping around, it’s hard to read, but it’s damn near impossible to proofread. Okay? You’re trying to look to see if something’s not spelled right and the letters aren’t staying stable for you. How do you know what you’re looking at? So again, that’s a really powerful feature.

The next one is colorblindness contrast. The contrast one is good for low vision, but we’ve also found people who have migraine headaches who are telling us that it helped with their headaches and that was nice. And we got night mode and dark mode. And it also then you can click on the little Morphic icon and it’ll pop up and let you access all the other accessibility features as well, without… it actually will drop you into the control panel, but it’ll drop you on the feature and it doesn’t look scary. It doesn’t look like you shouldn’t be there and you’re not wandering around amongst all these other things that look very scary ’cause you don’t know what they mean. And so, it’s something people are not afraid to go do. So that’s the MorphicBar.

We went to a couple universities and we did a study where we put some software in that would look at these access features before we put Morphic in to see what their usage was. And then we put in Morphic and we looked afterwards and we would see something like 700% increase, 17000% increase. In some cases it was infinite because there was no usage before Morphic 1 yet. So it’s a divide by zero, you get an infinitely infinite percent. So the three things it does is, one is it makes it so that people are aware of them. Two, it puts it so that they’re there and easy to access and use, and it keeps them from being afraid of them. So that’s a MorphicBar.

Number two, AT-on-Demand. So let’s say you’re blind and you need a screen reader, but you don’t have a computer at home. Either there’s five kids at home and there’s only one computer, and so the kids all go to the library. Or there’s no computers at home or there’s no internet at home, and people go to the library or the community center. Well, all of the siblings and all of your peers can use all those computers, but you can’t because no one will allow you to install any software, much less assistive technologies on the computers in these locations. Now, sometimes there will be one or two computers in some room that have a couple AT on it, but there’s like 60 different types of AT that you can use to access computers. So if you don’t have a computer, then you can’t use your AT, you can’t be an AT user, that’s just a total barrier.

But even those who do, why do we have all these computers in all these schools, and all these classrooms, and all these libraries, if nobody really needs them because everybody could just use their computer or their phone or their whatever. And if it is important enough to pay for the money and to put all those computers in there, why shouldn’t people with AT be able to use them too? So AT-on-Demand does the following. It allows you to, if you’re an AT user and you have an AT, you have a license to use it, you can go in and sit down to any computer at the library, any computer at the school, any computer at any desk in any classroom, and your AT shows up on that computer configured for you. And when you get up, it disappears

Really?

And it can do that for the first time because we have a way of doing it that’s safe and secure. We take all of the installation packages for all the AT and we put them in a bundle and we scan them all, they’re all fresh from the AT vendor anyway. We give it to the school or the library, they can scan it again if they want to, and they put it on their server inside their firewall. And so, when somebody comes in and sits down to the computer, it gets a fresh, sterile, clean copy of that person’s AT off of the server at that library or at that school, puts it on the computer. Then it takes the settings, which it saved for that person, then those are saved in the cloud. And it sets it up exactly the way that person needs to have it set up. And then when they’re gone, it disappears. So that’s AT-on-Demand.

And our goal is to have it on every shared use or public computer, period. Now, how can we do that? Well, first of all, Morphic and AT-on-Demand are both free. They’re free to the user, they’re free to the school, they’re free to the library. So there’s no reason financially to not put it on every public or shared use computer or any other computer you want to. And secondly, it’s set up, as I said, in such a fashion that it is secure and that the places that are doing it don’t need to work at it. As a matter of fact, it actually decreases the effort that the IT department has to do because once you put Morphic on all these computers, which is easy, it installs in about eight seconds. They no longer have to worry about screening additional AT when it comes in or figuring out which computers it has to install it on.

They can actually, if you do IT, you’ll know that one of the things you want to do is you don’t want to have multiple images. You’d like to have one image you put on all your computers. Well, right now, any of your computers has AT, you put your image on all of them, except those, ’cause have to have extra software on them. And then those have to be different. And then you have to update them separately, blah, blah, blah. With AT-on-Demand one image, all your computers. And you never have to worry about anybody saying, well, could you install this for this person? Because it’ll automatically be there when they need it and gone when they’re done.

Another one is people who say that their computer crashes and they’re at a company. And what the company does is when their computer crashes, they just replace it with another one and it’s like, whoa, you just took away all my software, all my AT, all my settings, I got to start all over from scratch? And so, having something that they give you a new computer, it downloads a new software, and your settings go into it and you’re back up and running instantly. Also, for interns, it’s great who often get an internship and then they get a really late start compared to all their peers. So that’s AT-on-Demand.

Nice.

Yeah. Number three is something we just came out with, that’s called Learn and Try. First of all, we have been going to places, and some places are using Chromebooks or they’re using iOS or tablets or things like this, and you can’t do Morphic and AT-on-Demand on those because they’re all locked down. You can’t install software that affects any other software, so you can’t do them. And Chromebooks, you don’t need AT-on-Demand because everything is automatically in the cloud, but even the MorphicBar, you can’t add later.

So what we’ve done with these is we’ve created a Learn and Try tool, and it does the following; in it, it lists every different adaptive software that we can find for all of the platforms, and it includes the stuff that’s built in, it includes the stuff that’s free, and it includes the stuff that you can buy. And you can then go in and just say, I am looking for something to help with reading or blindness or low vision, or you just check those boxes and you say, I’m on this computer, and it takes this big list and it filters it on down to just the items that would match the things that you select, and then lets you just look through them and read them.

And then in the future, at least for Windows, we’re going to be coupling it with AT-on-Demand so that if you wanted to try some of these things, many of them you’d just be able to try as well. But it will tell you for the other ones it will tell you where to find them or how to turn them on if you already have them. Because a lot of times this stuff is already in the computer and people just don’t know about it.

So those are the three tools. All of them are free. Morphic’s been out for a couple of years. It’s been used, I don’t know, three quarters of a million times or something. I have to go back and look at the numbers. The AT-on-Demand, we’re rolling out right now. And the Learn and Try tool, we’re also in the process of just finishing up and it should be out in the next six months. You can find about all of these if you go to morphic.org, M-O-R-P-H-I-C dot O-R-G. And so, if you go there as the stuff becomes available, it will show up on that website.

Yeah, I’m sure you have quite a few of these over the years, but do you have a story about maybe someone’s experience with Morphic and maybe how it made a positive impact on them?

There was one library that called us up and they had just tried it. They put it on their computers one day, and they said the same day, this woman came up and said, “Thank you so much. This is the first time I’ve been to a library that actually cared about old people.” And he says, “What do you mean?” She says, “Well, you have your computers, you can adjust them so that you can actually use them. This is the first time I’ve ever been able to actually use the computers because the prints is always too small.” And what he found out is that she had gone in, sat down, the MorphicBar popped up, and so she goes, oh. So she tried the text size and it came larger, and that was it. That was the first time she had ever really been able to use it. And they called us to say, well, they were now going to try and see if they couldn’t push into all the computers in the state because they know more than got it on and bingo, they had someone come in.

And this is a problem, and that is that the libraries, for example, are the number one place that people who are older go to try and see what a computer is and learn about it. Then they even have classes for seniors. But these classes, they will come in and they’ll have seniors who will come in and if they need assistive technologies or something to use the computer, they will just drop out of the classes. And even if they have AT, they won’t use it because they can’t see the screen because it’s too small, but they don’t need AT because they don’t have a disability, they just have old eyes. So you’ll see that on Morphic there’s nothing about accessibility about it. There’s no little wheelchair icon. It just says text size at the bottom of the screen. You click on it, the text gets bigger, and that’s good. So you don’t have to get into it.

And ironically, these features were called accessibility. They changed them to ease of access because people didn’t like the stigma of accessibility, and then people can’t find them. I’ll end with somebody once said that, “Everybody will acquire disabilities unless they die first.” So you actually can take a choice. You’re either going to acquire disabilities or you’re going to die first. You can take a choice. So it’s really for all of us and people at any age can also acquire disabilities.

Yeah, they definitely can. Well, Gregg, what was the website again where folks can go and find out more about Morphic?

morphic.org. M-O-R-P-H-I-C dot O-R-G.

All right. We’ll throw that down in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about Morphic and just all the really great things it can do for individuals, for businesses, for other places, and really just all the great tools that it has available.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

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 at INDATA Project. 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 guest and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show is 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. 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.