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Lex Frieden:
Technology is kind of an interesting area for all of us. It is a pretty good example of what I would call universal design. Now, it's possible to build technology in a way that people with disabilities don't have access to it, but quite frankly, it's easier to build technology in a way that everybody does have access to it.
So we've seen a kind of dramatic increase in the opportunities for people with disabilities that are proportional to the development of technology in the last 20 years. I can remember when I was a student in college in 1971 with a group of other disabled students talking about well, in fact, I used this device, it's a little brace that snaps on my arm. It's really basic what we call low technology, but I like it and it snaps on my arm and it will hold a pen or a fork or any other kind of device.
But at that time, I would put a pencil with a big eraser on the end of it in the end of my little device here and I'd tap on the typewriter, one key at a time, to do my thesis and my dissertation and so on and that was pretty grueling, actually. It got a lot easier after IBM started selling rebuilt Selectric typewriters to people with disabilities for a relatively low price. I think it was $100, $150 at that time. That was marvelous because then you didn't have to double check before you hit the key. If you made a mistake, you could correct it relatively easy. That was like a modern breakthrough, a miracle in technology for those of us at the time who were trying to peck our way through graduate school.
But I remember one evening after we had some libation somebody saying, wouldn't it be cool if you could just talk to that darn thing and it would print what you said. Well, today, you can, and I don't think it was a result of my friend, after some libation, dreaming that. But I do think it was as a result of the natural evolution of technology, and we see more and more of that, and the more we see of it, oddly enough, it's interesting, the more we take it for granted.
You know, I mean, how many of you can remember when you didn't have a microwave oven? It's really hard. But microwave ovens, that was breakthrough technology. Of course, cell phones now around the world are everywhere, and people used to chuckle about that being pretty Dick Tracy. Well, you can get a cell phone that will fit on your wrist now.
So we see this evolving technology and I think it's really good because it helps people with disabilities who use that technology be like everybody else. It doesn't make people with disabilities who are the only ones using the technology be yet again different from everybody else and I think that's kind of an important idea. This whole universal technology, universal design concept is very important.
You know, when you think about it, businesses are doing more and more universal design. It's really hard for me to flush a toilet in the men's room, to reach up there and push that old lever on the urinal. You women probably don't know what we're talking about, but there's a lever there. You've got to push that darn lever. Well, now in most modern office toilets, you don't push the lever anymore. It does it on its own and that's pretty cool, and that's another example of modern technology, you know. It's universal design. Everybody is benefiting from at least the men in the scenario are benefiting from the universal technology and the universal design.
I really do think that as society begins to grasp the benefits of technology, it's going to make the world more open for people with different kinds of abilities. Yet, there will be an ongoing need to reach out and use technology in some creative ways to address the needs of other people.
But let me give you one more example, the PDA, the little pocketbook reminder that many people carry. Probably most people in the room have one of those things. You know, years ago in rehabilitation, medical rehabilitation, we treat a lot of people in our facility who have brain injuries and one of the primary results of a brain injury is loss of memory. People with brain injuries or anybody who's had a pretty bad knock on the head, whether it was when you were a child falling out of the crib or maybe got in a fight with a doorway late at night one night or whatever it was, people that get knocked on the head sometimes have a difficult time remembering certain kinds of things and the PDA, that little pocket desktop assistant, is another accommodation that we take for granted now.
It used to be in rehabilitation we would teach people how to take a little notepad out of their pocket and make a note and to remember when it was and to recognize when it was that their memory was liable to lapse on something and to make a note, and we spent a lot of time training people about that. Well, now virtually everybody has the opportunity to make a note and it helps us all, so I think that's important.
Sometimes, I think when we try to employ technology to assist people with disabilities, we try to get too imaginative. Again, early on after I broke my neck, somebody, an engineer, rigged up a device to make my fingers move and this device had an elaborate plastic brace around the arm and then it had some velcro straps around my fingers and it had an artificial muscle here that would contract when you push a button and C02 gas would go in the muscle.
I remember when I first got that thing in the rehab again, I was kind of into this mobility thing and I said to the doctor who invented it, I said, now, I have to have this bottle of C02 gas in order to make my hand move, right? He said, 110h, that's right. That's how you make the muscle contract." And I said, and this bottle, I'm going to carry this with me? And he said, "Oh, yeah." He said, "We can be very mobile. We can actually put a strap on it and hang it on the back of your wheelchair." And I thought, well, okay. Maybe we're getting somewhere with this.
And then I said, now I went to rehab hospital in Houston, which was even at the time a big city. I told him I was moving back to my home,
which at the time was a small town in Oklahoma, Alva, population 5,000. It's still Alva, population 5,000, by the way, in Northwestern Oklahoma.
But I said to him, now, when I get home with this bottle of gas, how do I get it filled up? And he just, I mean, the man turned green because they didn't have the facilities in a lot of these rural communities to be filling up this C02 gas. And after about three days of puzzling on this, he actually did answer the question, because they had a tank of C02 gas at the fire department and he made a deal with them that when I needed more C02 gas, I could go to the fire department and get pumped up.
That, to me, was a little bit too high tech, and I think that even today, we try to look for high tech solutions when there are low tech solutions, and not to mention the gas leaking and finding replacement gas and the switches breaking and so on and so forth. And furthermore, if you carry a bottle of C02 gas on an airplane, it's equivalent to a bomb, because when the atmosphere changes and everything, it explodes. This is not a good thing to be traveling with.
So I got this $200 brace that a friend of mine made of some material and it'll do the same thing. Virtually, I can take it on and off by myself and take it with me wherever I go. Nobody ever mistakes it for a bomb. If it gets bent, I can find a pair of pliers somewhere, and hotel engineers are pretty well trained to deal with bending the thing back in place, and I don't have to go to the fire department to get the muscle pumped up.
I think that we have to look for low tech kinds of solutions and I think a lot of those are already available in the workplace and I think we use them for employees, not people with disabilities, and then turn around and stop and think about it when it's a person with a disability that needs it. And let me give you an example of how that works.
At one point, Steve Bartlett this morning mentioned my friend in Houston who was a salesman and he needed a car and a driver and so on and so forth. I had the opportunity to talk to the CEO of that company that didn't hire him or didn't continue his employment, along with some of the other senior executives of the company and discussing reasonable accommodation. And the question about a car for a relatively low level salesperson employee came up and one of the staff there said that it just wouldn't be appropriate to be having a vehicle for our employees. We don't do that as a benefit. And I said to the CEO, I said, what do you come to work in?
And, you see, we do make accommodations for people and we make some fairly elaborate accommodations for people and I don't think we ought to have a double standard about the way we approach accommodations. Therefore, I think we really ought to address technology as a tool. I think we ought to address it as a way of making people productive to begin with and more productive after they're productive.
And I don't think there's a lot of breakthroughs that we're going to get from that except from the standpoint of our attitude about it. I don't think we ought to see somebody coming in with a request for a reasonable accommodation as something that will generate anxiety, but we ought to realize when that happens that we're making reasonable accommodation every day for virtually all of our employees, whether we regard them as disabled or not. And I think that when we do that, then disability again becomes more a part of the mainstream.