LCA: HackAbility

Bright purple hair seems certain to make Liz Henry distinct from the crowd, but it's another attribute that she came to linux.conf.au 2010 to talk about: her wheelchair. It is, in essence, a machine to move her body around. It's not surprising that she would like it to be easy to fix or to hack on, but that is not how things are. Cars can be fixed easily; anybody with a few skills can start a car repair business. But this cannot be done with wheelchairs, which are much simpler devices. A wheelchair is a medical device, so the normal rules don't apply. Liz would like to change those rules; she also wants the rest of us to understand why we want to change them too.

People with disabilities may seem like a distinct group, but the fact of the matter is that almost all of us will be people with disabilities at some point in our lives. The average human, Liz says, will spend about eight years coping with some sort of disability. The result is a huge business, fueled by large amounts of money from insurance companies and government. That business is not greatly concerned with empowering disabled people; that's something we're going to have to take care of ourselves. We cannot depend on nanobots to keep us going as our bodies age; instead, we should be designing and coding for our future now.

People who want to hack their own disability solutions will find relatively little useful information online. Why? Possible reasons include profit motives in a highly lucrative industry, the perceived need for the intervention of medical experts when creating solutions, and concerns about liability should things go wrong. Disabled people also tend to be pushed into the role of passive charity recipients and isolated from each other. So what disability solutions exist come from the "medical industrial complex." Most of us will need these solutions at some point, and we'll want to be able to hack on them; the medical industrial complex is not much interested in helping us to do that.

The best progress which has been made so far is in the areas of vision, speech, and gaming. We're seeing less in mobility, so far. But, even there, simple hacks exist: it's common to see users of walkers who have fitted tennis balls over the feet to make them glide properly. (Your editor notes, with amusement, that Walmart is selling walker tennis balls for a mere $28 - the price of dozens of normal balls). This is a hack which is easily done, easily noticed, and easily copied, so it has spread widely. Pockets for crutches made of duct tape were another example presented in the talk.

A good example of how things fall down can be seen in the area of ramps. A ramp is not a complex device, but ramps must still be built properly if they are not to collapse or dump their users on the floor. Information on proper ramp building is discouragingly rare on the net, and what is there is not open to contributions. Other bits of interesting information - such as the soda bottle prosthesis - are available, but what we're seeing, still, is relatively small attempts. There's no real model for building community around this kind of information yet.

Disability-friendly software, too, is not an easy hack; accessibility tends to be treated as a last-minute add-on. Web site accessibility, too, is often an afterthought, and tends to be user-focused. This approach tends to lead to sub-standard solutions, but it also fails to lead to a free, do-it-yourself culture. We need good accessibility for developers too.

Liz talked about a number of projects aimed at making life better (and more hackable) for people with disabilities. Consider voice synthesis and screen reading: much of what's happening in this area is proprietary, but there are also projects like Festvox, Fire Vox, NVDA, and the tools at Full Measure (Speakup was not mentioned). Other interesting projects include:

• YoutubeCC for the closed-captioning of videos,

• Gaze tracking and typing software from ITU GazeGroup.

• COGAIN, which is collecting information on gaze interaction.

• OneSwitch.org.uk is another collection point for information on assistive technologies.

• The GNOME project has accessibility information on the GNOME Accessibility page; Liz mentioned the Orca screen reader project in particular.

• On the KDE side, projects like KMouth and K Magnifier were mentioned.

• More information can be found on sites like lifekludger, OATS, AbilityNet, and Disapedia.

Liz also mentioned the BBC accessible newsreader; she wishes that the BBC would release the code so that it could be incorporated into content management systems and made widely available.

On the other side, there are antifeatures which make life harder for those who would hack better solutions. These include systems which people with disabilities cannot contribute to and one-off solutions which cannot be extended or improved upon. Especially harsh words were reserved for those who exploit vulnerable people; there is an awful lot of incredibly expensive assistive technology out there. "Freaking out about liability" is also an antifeature; Liz feels that many of those concerns are greatly overblown. Selling out to industry - going for patents and profit rather than making technology available - is also a step in the wrong direction.

As an example of good and bad ways of doing things, Liz contrasted the Free Wheelchair Mission and Whirlwind Wheelchair International. The former makes dirt-cheap wheelchairs out of lawn chairs and bicycle wheels, then ships them by the container load to poor countries. It seems like a good idea, but dumping all those cheap chairs devastates any local market that may have developed. When the chairs break (which tends to happen soon), there's nobody left to help keep them going. Whirlwind, instead, is focused on partnering with local industry and sharing information, creating a more hackable solution with more people to hack on it.

The core message from the talk was that disabled people are hackers by necessity; we should bring them in, get their input, and enable them to create their own solutions. Their solutions will become our solutions. We should, Liz says, prepare to open-source our way out of the retirement prisons which are waiting for us.

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