THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 13, 1994 TAG: 9406110035
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOSHUA QUITTNER\
DATELINE: 940613 LENGTH: Long
A blur of noise whirs from a cigarette-box-sized deck stuck to the side of his computer screen. The deck, a Verbette Mark I Speech Synthesizer, is reading Coombs' electronic mail aloud, at a rapid 450 words a minute.
{REST} There's e-mail from Bob Zenhausern, a psychologist at St. John's University in New York City whose life's work has been getting people with disabilities to connect online; and Sheila Rosenberg, who teaches the use of computer networks to Long Island schoolchildren who have autism, Tourette's syndrome or cerebral palsy; and Robert Ambrose of New York City, a volunteer trying to line up refurbished computers and Internet-access accounts for people who might otherwise be isolated at home.
Sitting in the half-light with Coombs, a sighted visitor might feel disoriented as the words trill out of the speech synthesizer. But to Coombs, who has been blind since age 9, it feels like speed reading.
``I'd really like it to go faster,'' he said. ``That way I could get more work done.'' It's an odd thought, Coombs getting more work done. Despite being blind, the 62-year-old history professor teaches a full course load at the Rochester Institute of Technology. But even that pales next to the work he's doing in cyberspace at the confluence of 15,000 intertwined computer networks called the Internet. There, Coombs is chairman of Project EASI, Equal Access to Software and Information, an organization funded through grants and publications that is leading the fight to get people with disabilities online. In cyberspace, Coombs - and Zenhausern and Rosenberg and Ambrose and a few others - are at the forefront of a movement that is empowering people with disabilities by connecting them to each other and the world through computer networks.
The online world can be many things to many people, but for someone who is blind or deaf or mobility-impaired, the communications revolution is truly liberating. Experts say that people with disabilities, who tend through necessity to be early adopters of technology anyway, are now moving into the world of computer networks with unusual haste, using such things as speech synthesizers, puff-and-sip straws connected to pointing devices that allow them to pick out letters on a computer screen, or mechanical switches attached to knees or elbows.
``There is not one thing that has happened to this population that is more significant than the electronic highway. It is for us like the discovery of the wheel,'' said Dick Banks, a visually impaired ``adaptive technologist'' at the University of Wisconsin who helps people with disabilities get online.
It's difficult to quantify how many disabled people are using the Internet, but experts agree the number is burgeoning as people with disabilities go online to connect to schools and jobs, and to network with others in similar situations.
Sightless people, for instance, can, for the first time, read a newspaper on the day it was published, rather than wait for a Braille version to arrive a week later. Deaf people can talk with anyone, without the need for a human interpreter. And the homebound can be freed from isolation and loneliness.
This new emphasis - spurred by the relative inexpensiveness of the new technology - comes at a key time. In July, the 2-year-old Americans With Disabilities Act will be extended to companies that employ as few as 15 people, ensuring that they make reasonable accommodations (that might include working part or all of the day from home) for people with disabilities.
Randy Horwitz, a blind 18-year-old computer science student at Rochester, found the Internet earlier this year after reading a mention of it in a Braille version of Cliff Stoll's book, ``The Cuckoo's Egg.''
``The Internet makes everything so accessible for us,'' he said, explaining that he uses it to talk with friends at other universities. To do this, he relies on two special tools: a voice synthesizer that reads information off his screen and a special pad he can place his hands over that spells out in Braille, one line at a time, the characters on his screen. The second device, he said, has allowed him to learn character-critical computer programming.
Mainly, though, he said he likes to tap into Usenet, a collection of more than 4,000 special-interest discussion groups available to most Internet users. ``I hate to talk about frivolous stuff, but they even post basketball box scores there,'' he said, admitting to being a big fan of Syracuse University. ``I'd never seen box scores before.''
``I don't know what I'd do without this,'' said Peter Boulay of his online life. ``I think I'd be a totally different person without these connections. I'd be bored.'' For Boulay, a 24-year-old double amputee, ``boredom'' can lead to alcoholism and despair, he said. In addition to being legless, Boulay was born with only one finger on each hand. That's enough to type on a computer keyboard, something that Boulay does for up to four hours each day.
``I type faster than most people with 10 fingers,'' he says.
The connections made in the virtual world have helped Boulay cope with the physical world. Now, he's completing an undergraduate degree and working toward a master's degree in social work at Rochester.
Boulay said he gets about 200 pieces of e-mail each day, most from special-interest lists devoted to disability issues. One list, for instance, is concerned with ramifications of the Disabilities Act.
Boulay, who has plenty of friends in the physical world and is active in a bowling league, also entertains himself online, playing an adventure game called Star Game. In the virtual world that Star Game players create, a la Dungeons & Dragons, he's Lt. Cmdr. Boulay, ``6-foot-5 inches tall, 240 pounds, blond hair, ice-blue eyes. A big boy, a very big boy and if anyone stands in his way for too long, they don't stay there,'' Boulay said.
``This is one major advantage of this technology: Physical impairments don't come into play and can be put out of mind, at least temporarily,'' Chris Bell wrote in an e-mail interview.
``I firmly believe that computer communications, along with the continuing abilities of writing and synthesized speech that computer technology provides, is a vital opportunity to extend lives otherwise swamped by frustration and loss.''
At the same time, though, some advocates remain cautious, warning that information technology can be misused, as well, neatly cutting off disabled people from the rest of the world.
``Many people in the disability movement are afraid that the technology will be used to isolate disabled people,'' said Deborah Kaplan, vice president of the World Institute on Disability, in Oakland, Calif. Kaplan also sits on the White House's National Information Infrastructure Task Force, which is examining the issues of access and affordability as the national information superhighway is built. ``Technology could be a tool for sticking people in their homes, both in terms of distance learning and employment,'' Kaplan said.
``For some people that may be a necessity - they really can't leave their homes - but that's really such a small part of the population that it frightens us.'' Instead, she said, online communications could be used to give people with disabilities greater flexibility. A disabled person who takes a particularly long time to get ready for work, for instance, could begin his or her work day at home, on a computer.
In Freeport, N.Y., Robert Mauro lies down on a desk next to his computer so he can type more comfortably. Mauro, whose bout with polio left him using a wheelchair and on a respirator, is the moderator of an e-mail list called Mobility-L, which is one of the e-mail lists that Boulay gets. Scoliosis makes it hard for Mauro to sit upright for more than a half hour, but lying down next to the keyboard, ``I can type all day,'' he said.
Mauro has been active in getting disabled people online ever since he got his first modem in 1985. ``I got involved with different (electronic) bulletin boards and commercial services like CompuServe,'' he said. ``I wasn't interested in games or downloading software, just communicating with people.''
{KEYWORDS} INTERNET DISABLED HANDICAPPED by CNB