Inclusive Technologies

We’re here to help you develop, market, or purchase accessible and usable products — products that work better for everyone because they’re easy to use.

Inclusive Technologies provides a full range of consulting services to companies, public agencies, consumers, researchers, purchasers, and policy makers on how products can better meet the needs of all users, including users with disabilities and elders.

Contact us by email (info AT inclusive DOT com) or phone (+1.908.907.2387)

The FCC released its National Broadband Plan (PDF), and accessibility advocates should be congratulating themselves on all the accessibility recommendations in it.  It includes almost all of the provisions found in the COAT bill, and adds a few more: a high-level Broadband Accessibility Working Group, exhortations to fully implement Section 508, exploration of network-based accessibility services like NPII, and enough other technological and policy initiatives to keep us experts all employed forever offer an almost utopian vision of a fully accessible ICT universe.

The FCC has announced that Karen Peltz Strauss will become the Commission’s new Deputy Bureau Chief of the Consumer and Government Affairs Bureau.  Karen is a long-time expert and advocate on access, having worked with Gallaudet University, the Telecommunications Access RERC, and COAT.  She has been involved in every aspect of accessibility legislation and regulation for more than 30 years, including authoring key sections of the ADA and the Telecom Act.  Karen was the first head of the FCC’s Disability Rights Office.  She authored A New Civil Right, a comprehensive history of telecommunications accessibility.  Her appointment is a signal from the Obama administration and FCC Chairman Genachowski that accessibility will not be shunted aside, but will be built into the fabric of US technology policy as it seeks to expand access to broadband to all citizens.

Here’s a great little animation about alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) tools: who should be in charge of them, and for what purpose.  It may be a little hard for non-experts to decode, but it makes a clear case for AAC as an expressive medium designed for its user, not a clinical medium designed for its professional.

We know that all the assistive technology compatibility and built-in accessibility features don’t mean a thing if the user never learns about them.  Retail has often been the Bermuda Triangle of accessibility.  The bottom-line fever of the undertrained, commission-driven sales staff makes customized service unlikely.  Now Computers Made Easy in Fort Worth offers another model of retail.  It caters to people with disabilities and the rest of us who nervously wonder if we can operate the latest gadget or program.  The name alone is relaxing!  Let’s hope this becomes a chain, and reminds its big box brethren that customers come in all shapes and sizes.

Computer store bridges technology gap for seniors and disabled - Fort Worth Business Press

I watched Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” last night.  For those who haven’t seen the movie, Clint plays an aging bigot in a shifting neighborhood who gets caught up in gang violence after his wife’s death.  Clint’s crusty persona sprays bitter contempt onto the changing world around him as his own health fails.

There’s a scene with his son and daughter-in-law on his birthday that stayed on my mind.  They arrive with presents: a reacher and a big-button phone.  Needless to say, Clint does not express his appreciation; his subsonic growl builds as they cautiously suggest moving to an assisted living facility.  We don’t get to see Clint’s explosion, but we do see the pair hurriedly leaving in exasperation at their own attempt to reach out to him.

My first reaction, of course, was “Thanks, Eastwood, you dipstick, for thoughtlessly stigmatizing accessibility and usability to score shallow cinematic points!  Just what the world needs, another portrayal of comfort and convenience as sissified and demeaning.”  I slept the righteous sleep of the professionally self-justified.

I awoke less so.  People on the receiving end of our beneficence *do* have reactions of reluctance, resistance, and rejection.  Are they all dysfunctional fools, or are they just paying resentful attention to the social markers invisibly embossed on every manufactured object?  If an upscale watch means “I’m stylish and rich”, what does a reacher mean?  And what does giving someone a reacher mean?

When “practitioners” look at a reacher we see an elegant interaction between the sophisticated, painstaking domains of clinical insight and design excellence, and we’re right.  It’s just that someone else looking at it sees a prop for a tragedy, and they’re right, too.

I’m sure we’re all doing as much as we can to trim the stigmatic overtones from highly usable and assistive products, and I wouldn’t want anyone to slack off because those efforts are not always rewarded with elder-glee.  But I think we’d better pay more attention to how the recipient views the exchange.  Sometimes it’s not the chrome-plated heart of the gadget I can’t do without; it’s the chrome-plated face on the dipstick who gives it to me.