IPad Opens World to a Disabled Boy

Excerpted from the New York Times: read the entire story and view pictures.

OWEN CAIN depends on a respirator and struggles to make even the slightest movements — he has had a debilitating motor-neuron disease since infancy.
Owen, 7, does not have the strength to maneuver a computer mouse, but when a nurse propped her boyfriend’s iPad within reach in June, he did something his mother had never seen before.

He aimed his left pointer finger at an icon on the screen, touched it — just barely — and opened the application Gravitarium, which plays music as users create landscapes of stars on the screen. Over the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.

A speech pathologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center uses text-to-speech applications to give patients a voice. Christopher Bulger, a 16-year-old in Chicago who injured his spine in a car accident, used an iPad to surf the Internet during the early stages of his rehabilitation, when his hands were clenched into fists. “It was nice because you progressed from the knuckle to the finger to using more than one knuckle on the screen,” he said.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, who wrote recently enacted legislation that will require mobile devices to be more accessible to users with disabilities, said approximately three-fourths of communications and video devices need to be adapted for blind and deaf people. “Apple,” he said in a statement, “is an outlier when it comes to devices that are accessible out of the box.”
The iPad is also, generally speaking, less expensive than computers and other gadgets specifically designed to help disabled people speak, read or write. While insurers usually do not cover the cost of mobile devices like the iPad because they are not medical equipment, in some cases they will pay for the applications that run on them.

Diversity Executive Magazine: Americans Say Employ Those With Disabilities

by: Kellye Whitney, 11-16-2009 (used with permission)

A new survey released by National Industries for the Blind (NIB) reports that more than 9 out of every 10 Americans believe the government should support programs creating employment opportunities for people who are blind or have other significant disabilities.

Yet figures also show that more than 60 percent of people who are blind or have other significant disabilities are not employed.

Kevin Lynch, president and CEO of National Industries for the Blind, said he isn’t surprised there is an open attitude regarding people with disabilities or people who are blind. But he said diversity executives and other leaders with the power to influence hiring decisions must be willing to make the initial, relatively minimal, investment necessary to accommodate those who are blind or have visual impairments or other disabilities.

“This is an investment that has a great return,” he explained. “[NIB has] a dedicated workforce of individuals that on a daily basis are out to prove that they are capable and able to do what anyone can do. Certainly technology these days has leveled the playing field particularly for individuals who are blind, and they don’t want anyone to be able to utilize the fact that they may have a visual impairment or be blind as an excuse for their not being able to perform.”

Read the entire story in Diversity Executive Magazine online at http://www.diversity-executive.com/article.php?article=776

Find out about NIB's "Business Leaders Program" at offers business training at four levels for people who are blind at www.nib.org.