Professional Luncheon Presentation - Part 3

by Cheryl Heppner

Editor: The luncheon speaker was Dr. Alan Herwitz, the head of the National Technical Institute of the Deaf (NTID). Here's Cheryl's report on his comments.

This is part three of three parts.

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Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three

The WFA and Design for All

Diversity is also a very important. The World Federation for the Deaf convention in Spain was a wonderful conference. At a plenary session, Antti Raike, a deaf person from Finland, gave one of the most powerful presentations that I have ever seen. He is a computer scientist and engineer, and he talked about designing technology that's open for everyone. He also talked about how important it is to have collaborative efforts with people across the board.

He calls this DFA, Design for All. Oftentimes we think about what is the best design for the Deaf community, and the market's small, but if we make the design for everyone, that makes the market larger. How can we become involved in the early design stages? We can't wait until the product is out and then start to give input. I encourage us all to get involved in the early stages of design of a product so that input can be given in terms of what the needs are.

He also talked about what you call the ratchet influence, which is a culmination of culture and experience and how culture is evolving, so that we have an impact on technology to incorporate that information as well. Deaf culture has a lot of potential for influence in terms of universal design for products for everyone. If you go to a classroom and tell one of the instructors how to prepare for deaf students, then the hearing students often benefit from that as well.

There are ways of thinking that make the computers or the equipment easier to use, more user friendly so that anyone is able to sit down and be successful. This morning Pam Holmes spoke about HDTV and her complications and frustrations with trying to get those things going. I remember when Phil Bravin was working for IBM, I once asked him why IBM made their manuals so difficult to read and understand. And he said, "well, we want to keep our customers coming back".

In the Future

Transhumanism is a wonderful concept of the future. Suppose there are medical issues such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure. You can have something installed in your vein so that doctors could track your cholesterol level, blood pressure, and a whole host of other medical conditions.

In the future, we can expect to see more emergence and convergence of technologies, including nanotechnology, cognitive science, biotech, artificial intelligence, all coming together and synthesized.

Probably we'll see more and more social networks. I think it occurs more with the younger population. Right now we have a huge server that many people access, but in the future it's possible that each person will have their own personal server. They could network with anyone.

In revisiting the past, people approached problem solving from the top down. It's been suggested that a team approach might be a better way of working, instead of people making decisions at the top and then not actually being in touch with what is needed once it reaches the group of people that are making that happen.

Learning in collaboration is another idea, like how we're trying to find ways to improve informal learning of deaf citizens. New technology of the future could create, say, a new Deaf culture. Would collaboration make some kind of impact in that way? You know, everything evolves. There's nothing wrong with the evolving of things, as we've all been young and now we're older. Nothing's lost. It's just that it evolves and it gets better and better as we age.

TDI's Opportunities

I would like to talk about opportunities that TDI has in terms of leading collaboration with businesses and industry. I see it happening now, but you cannot just assume that we're in a good place and that everything's fine. We have to keep working. This is the beginning of our work, the beginning of our collaborations, and in maintaining those networking ties that we have established.

I would like people to think about adopting Antti Raike's model of learning and collaboration. We can learn together and collaborate together. Finally, just continuing awareness, sensitivity, education and training on diversity and inclusion. Everyone's different, and that's fine. And this is where I believe that TDI will go in the future.

Roy Miller, TDI Board President:

I want to thank Alan very much for spending time with us today and giving us those words of wisdom. I learned something, which I always do from just about everybody that I listen to. Alan and I share another thing. I now learned that he was born in Iowa. I was born and raised in Illinois. So we both ate a lot of corn in our background.

It's really delightful for me to listen to a man who recites history from experience. You listened to some of my recitation yesterday. You have to realize that I was a person who did not live that experience because I grew up hearing. I read about it, I listened about it, I learned about it from others. That experience can never match the experience of a man who grew up and knows firsthand about that interactive network in St. Louis, the first one in the country.

Comment:

One of our biggest concerns is, as Alan pointed out, that technology is moving very, very rapidly, and we want technology to work for us. We want it to come to us and us to be able to work with it.

But it's coming so fast, and most of us are laymen. We don't have the inner knowledge of where it's going, what the opportunities are, whether we're behind the eight ball, how far behind we are, and how we ever can catch up. So my question is, if the world is going very rapidly, those of us who are older, we're not technologically savvy. We don't have the background the younger generation has, with PCs, PDAs, and all manner of equipment. Even five-year-olds can do things on computers that I can't do. How do we keep up with technology? What needs to be done at the national and state level to assure that deaf and hard of hearing people with disabilities of all kinds are able to maximize their relationship to technology, to bring it for their benefit?

Alan Hurwitz:

Debbie Kaplan's keynote address listed the five processes. One of them was infiltration. It's time for us to infiltrate, not wait and sit back for things to happen. It's time for us to go on into these corporations and be involved. We need to ensure that young people are aware about the opportunities that take place in science, technology, engineering, and math across the board so that they are better prepared, and when they finish their academic studies they can go straight into these businesses and industries and have an impact on what's happening for the future.

You talked about the young people. It is amazing. I'm a grandfather of two grandchildren, and they are unbelievable whizzes on the computer. Sometimes I'll ask them how to do certain things. They'll tell me. They have no fear of technology.

Here's Part One

Here's Part Two

Here's Part Three