By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
Richard Ely is currently the assistive technology guru for Forbes Library in Northampton, but that is just the most recent way he’s used his knowledge to help others. His career included outreach work for the Perkins School for the Blind, an auditory descriptive services project for students with disabilities for WGBH Boston, work as a special education teacher in several school districts and most recently, principal of En-Vision, a company that provides vision education services in Western Mass.
Prime reached out to Ely for help understanding how assistive tech can help improve quality of life. Here’s what he had to say:
Q: What kinds of quality of life issues can be addressed through the use of assistive technology?
“This is a quick overview of issues dealing with retaining independence and preserving access to activities that bring pleasure to life. The focus is on digital devices, but there are also tools that can keep one cooking, sewing, gardening and the like that one might call low tech.
“Loss of social connection is a common issue for us as we age. Many have turned to social tools to stay in touch with family and friends, using built-in access tools in Apple and Android devices as well as those for PCs and Macs. These can include: magnify text and images; speak information on the screen; support for hearing aids; typing or gesture help for individuals with tremors; and use of dictation to control tablets or phones and to text.
“With the Alexa and Google home devices one can give spoken commands to play a selected song, get a weather report, listen to the news, play a game, place an order online, text a friend, create a reminder and with additional hardware – turn on lights, and adjust the home temperature.
“For book lovers finding it difficult to see to read, to turn pages or to hold a book, the National Library Service has a library of some 80,000 recorded books. These can be read on digital cartridges on a special player the program provides, or on Apple and Android devices with a free app. For qualifying individuals, there is no cost to any part of this program.
“For TV and movie fans who are losing vision, there is audio description. AD provides a spoken narration of what is taking place on the screen during the intervals when there is no dialog, including elements such as character appearance and setting description. In the theater, if the film has been described, one borrows a headset that provides the description. Many streaming services such as Netflix and Prime offer description of any film that originally had AD provided, and many programs produced in-house for the services are described. There is also a Federal requirement that all commercial TV stations provide a set number of hours of audio described programs per week. Many streaming devices such as Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Roku also make it simple to turn the AD feature on and off, as do newer televisions. For its premium packages, Comcast offers a system that allows one to search by voice for content such as program, film title, genre or actor, and the menus and search results are spoken via high quality synthetic speech.”
Q: How does someone with one of these issues get access to the kind of technology that they need?
“Increasingly, assistive technology is built into many devices. Both Windows for the PC and the OS on Apple Macintosh computers have many features built in and these are constantly being refined. Not all but many phones and tablets have a range of assistive features included in their operating system. Some State agencies are providing tools like smart speakers for their older clients.”
Q: Are there costs involved in using any of these assistive technologies? Are they something that insurance plans may cover in whole or in part?
“Increasingly, AT tools are being included as part of the basic devices. When not free, the cost of many accessible tools is low. For example, some insurance companies will support all or part of the cost of communication devices for the nonverbal. And there are apps that can turn a tablet into a fully-featured, menu-driven communication device.They cost more than ones that address general challenge like hearing or vision loss, but still are a fraction of the cost of the earlier single function communication devices.”
