Vendor Halls - CTG 2003
Between the sessions (and during some of them!) during the 2003 Closing the Gap conference I meandered the vendor exhibits. I learned about a lot about the specialized software and hardware that existed for the assistive technology market. I was amazed at the number of vendors and the range of technology that existed. Here were some ofthe vendors I wrote a note about after a day in the vendor halls:
Don Johnston
BuildAbility - www.donjohnston.com/catalog/buildabilityd.htm
This multimedia authoring tool allows teachers and students to create simple, linear multimedia presentations with digital pictures and movie clips. When viewing the finished product, there are hooks built in for switches to allow the student to choose when to advance. It looked very easy to use and the finished product contained the player so that it could be taken home to Mom and Dad.
Ablenet - www.ablenetinc.com
Step-by-step with levels
The Step by Step switch with levels allows the student to start a script at the beginning or to jump ahead in the script to one of two other places (levels). The teacher using this would have to switch the "level" switch.
Super Talker
This choice board speaks 1, 2, 4 or 8 phrases depending on the overlay used. I guess its a new product for Ablenet and they seemed very excited about it, but it seemed there were many other products that do what this does.
Talking Photo Album
Pictures can be inserted on each page and a voice recorded to make a tool for reminding or to get a sequence of events right.
BookWorm
By placing a piece of colored tape on each page of a book and recording your voice reading that page of the book you can make this device read the book to a student. There are 8 buttons and a magnetic switch you put on the 8th page to allow the BookWorm to read up to a 16 page book. The memory in the bookworm is a module that you can pull out and put in another bookworm. Presumably you could have a library of these memory modules for all of your books.
Talking Symbol notepad
This is just a little plastic card with a place to put a symbol and a switch that activates a 10 second message.
Lightspeed Classroom Amplifier - www.lightspeed-tek.com
In a crowded room with a lot of talking, I hear no one, my brain can't do it. As a speaker, my voice seems to blend in with any background noise. If I were to teach, I am sure students would ask me to repeat myself a lot. Since kids may not hear well, this company makes a high frequency amplifier that amplifies the consonants of speech more than the vowels. The idea is that the kids with difficulty hearing and understanding will have greater difficulty if they have to strain to hear you. At first I didn't believe it would make much difference, but the vendor voice was extremely clear in a noisy room. It was a really nice effect, I could hear him perfectly but his voice wasn't overwhelming like it would be if he set up a PA system.
Eye response Technologies - www.eyeresponse.com
This was a tablet PC with a camera that was focused on the users eye. By looking around the screen the user moves the mouse. A stare at one section would click the mouse. The vendor said that most people could get up and running in a couple of days. There claim was that they beat the competitors on price and the user gets to control the PC. I guess some other eye response vendors don't, although I didn't see anyother vendors at this conference.
AbleLink Technologies - www.ablelinktech.com
This company seemed to be as enthusiastic about what they were doing as anyone out there. I spent quite a while at their booth listening to their stories about the uses of the technology, but I felt there was a bunch of big-hearted people working here. They work with the mentally disabled.
AssessNet and QuestNet- www.assess.net and www.ablelink.org/questnet
This is a research based service to allow a survey of the mentally disabled. Strategies for assessing the needs and desires of disabled students are sometimes difficult. Yes/no questions often lead to many 'yes' answers and true/false often doesn't translate. This group is familiar with the special needs of surveying this special population and report that they achieve equal results with paper surveys with on online survey.
Discovery Desktop/WebTrek/WebTrek Connect
This desktop software is designed for those who can neither read nor write. Buttons turn on the WebTrek browser or WebTrek Connect email software. Users can bookmark favorite web sites (that are aloud in customizable sections or all at once) with a picture taken from the site. To send an email to someone out of the picture based address book, they select the correct picture and then they record their voice. Incoming email is either read aloud by the computer or voice files are unzipped and played.
Cell Phones
A T-mobile phone (a palm device with a phone) with most of its features removed and special software allow mentally disabled people to receive and make phone calls using a picture based phone book and caller id.
TextHelp - www.texthelp.com
A competitor to Kurzweil, TextHelp is modular and fits in with any application where typing is needed. It does word prediction, reads whatever you want it to, and checks for spelling mistakes by phonetics. If TextHelp was on my home computer, I would love it.