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Next up, that changes gears a little bit, talking about a digital side of making with
Chad. Big round of applause for Chad.
Hi everybody. My name is Chad and I'm also from Canada and I wanted to talk for a couple
minutes about the world's largest minority group people with disabilities. Stat shows
the 1 in 7 people have permanent disability and impacts their quality of life that’s
a billion people around the world and it is the most inclusive minority group. Anyone
can join it at any time, doesn't matter your race, your ethnicity, your gender or ***
orientation disability can impact and reach anybody. Now in the early eighties some movement
began in Canada that started change in reception of people with disabilities. Terry Fox was
a young man who lost his leg to cancer but three years later he began his Marathon of
Hope where every day on his one leg he ran a full marathon and he did that 150 days until
he died of cancer which inspired Rick Hansen to kind of continue that mission and over
the course of two years he rolled around the world in his wheelchair. So, they're started
to change the conversation from people with disabilities and with more to focus on their
abilities. But as I am at the Nonprofit Technology Conference I’d like to tell couple of stories
about intersection disability in technology. When Neil broke his neck in a car accident
he couldn’t move his arms, he couldn’t move his legs and had a very difficult time
speaking and eventually lost his ability to speak. So, his cousin Bill Cameron said something
we gotta do for Neil. It is unacceptable that this bright young man is literally trapped
in his body and unable to speak. So, he hired a couple co-op students and they develop the
system called sip and puff and by sipping and puffing on a tube it work like a switch
on off or for technical people a zero and a one. And they then connected that Morse
code machine so the sip and puffs became dots and dashes and then they connected that to
state of the art Apple 2e computer. So, by Neil sipping and puffing on tube he was able
to type on the screen and it literally gave him his voice back. He could say things like
15 seconds of slide is way too quick. So other people that were in the rehab facility saw
what was going on with Neil and said you know I will like to learn and use technology. I
think it could improve my quality of life. So, he was able to secure some government
funding to hire more youth intern to create more access methods some of these disability
technology access methods are things that you use every day and don't realize it. Have
any of you ever sent a text message before? That's been around since 1964 and began as
accommodation for the deaf and hard of hearing. So many of these things actually come and
impact all of our lives. So it's clear that technology and its evolution can really change
the life for people with disabilities. So when Neil passed we started nonprofit in his
memory a little over 30 years ago. Now focus on how technology can empower people with
disabilities and then initial prototype that they built for Neil is now a commercial product
is called the Jos. It’s joystick you can mount it on your desk, plug it into your computer
and by moving the joystick up down left right in your mouth it moves the mouse on your screen.
So, this is Don Danbrook. He's on our board of directors. He's a tetraplegic but he works
full-time as a Chartered Accountant. He's going back to school to be an architect. He's
a brilliant man that has able to kind of contribute to the use of technology.
Now about ten years ago the rise of mobile phones began and for many of us this has changed
the way that we access, communicate and work with each other and it has opened many doors
for people disabilities but also created a new digital divide while this phone in my
pocket is a hundred thousand times more powerful than the computer then Neil used. There is
no mouth control sort of option that would allow some of us who can’t use our hands
to use a touch screen device. So we've recently received a Google impact
grant and we're developing a new prototype that we are calling the lip sync and it's
like the Jos but it’s control is about the size of my hand and it can be powered by the
phone to give someone complete control of their phone from their mouth device and I
have a couple young co-op student very similar to our founding story work with me. This is
Melad who has very limited use of his hands and his an engineer. So not only is this a
device is gonna help people with disabilities but it’s also been designed by people with
disabilities. What we're doing different this time compared
to the jos that it’s not a product that we want to manufacture and have sold for thousands
of dollars instead we are gonna open source the whole thing. We're going to release the
schematics, the diagrams and we are starting to work with universities in our community
to prints these devices to make them super affordable for people with disabilities and
the rise of 3D printers and makers in communities is changing a lot of things. There’s a lot
of prosthetic that are now being done. So people are going to print things for a couple
hundred dollars instead being made for tens of thousands of dollars.
So, I wanted to end with a quick poll. Who here used their mobile device today? Can I
see a show of hands? Let's make it so the people that can't lift their hands can use
mobile devices too. Thank you very much.