ABILITY Magazine: CSUN 2014

Hi, ABILITY Magazine!

We are all differently abled.

So, I'm Chris from Whill. We have a very
unique technology applied in the front

wheels. It's an omniwheel, which lets me
turn sideways with a really tight turning

radius. It's actually four-wheel drive,
so it does really well on terrains, grass,

pebble, dirt, we can handle all that.
So it's pretty practical for daily use.

We have a control that's more of a computer
mouse than a joystick, so you slide it sideways.

I'm James McCarthy, and I'm the
president of HIMS Inc.

We're an assistive technology company
for products for the blind and visually-impaired.

This year at CSUN we have an exciting booth.
We're introducing several new products.

The E-bot is the first and currently the
only iPad- and Android-compatible reading,

writing, and distance video magnifier with
OCR text-to-speech available on the market.

It's very useful in the classroom for students
because it's got reading, writing, and distance.

We don't want to design lean-to products.
We always want to do something new and

unique and beneficial for our blind and
low-vision consumers.

So, our company is a French company
created 20 years ago,

and we created the company on one idea: to
make the traffic lights talking to blind people.

The principle is quite simple. When you come
close to the traffic lights, you press the button,

and you would stop walking.

(Traffic light speaks)

And 20 years later, we have 100 thousand
traffic lights equipped in France.

We put the remote control inside the
smartphone, and we develop smartphone

applications to communicate with
the traffic lights.

My name's Thomas, I'm with
ViewPlus Technologies.

Today, we're here representing a few
different types of technology.

One that's really exciting is Voiceye.

Voiceye is a system comprised of a
two-dimensional barcode

in a smartphone application.

One of our great early adopters is
actually ABILITY Magazine.

So ABILITY Magazine is the first major
publication to utilize Voiceye to make

their magazine accessible.

(Voiceye reads from page)

So, this is Betsy's interface, and there's
the camera looking at her moving.

Hi, I'm Sergio, I'm the father of Betsy
Sergia Fernandez.

I'm a software developer.

Since Betsy has CP, and we've tried to
get her to communicate with us,

and we haven't been very successful because
she doesn't have enough control to hit the buttons,

or enough trunk support to use eye-gaze.

So I decided to build a system for her.

The system basically is going to be using this
camera, which is a perceptual technology camera,

that allows the computer to see her
movement, and then is going to use

that iPad and the app is going to hear
her when she talks to select movies.

APP: To watch Nickelodeon Music, say yes.

BETSY: Yes!

APP: Okay.

(TV plays)

Once we get her to consistently use
the movement of the hand, and the yes or no,

then we can really open the path of
communication for her.

You know, we'll hope that she will end up
using it in school, and all kinds of situations.

Yes, we can! Isn't that exciting?

As you can tell, she gets very excited
about using it, because for her she's never

been able to actually say what she wants,
so she knows this is the first time that

she can actually choose one thing over
another.

Yes!

Yes! It's exciting, huh?

I got low vision when I was 17.

All of a sudden, it was baseball season,
I was a baseball player,

I had, I took a line drive off of my face!

Living with low vision is my life, this
has become my career,

you know, it's my passion, it's my hobby,

so I'm really passionate about the things
that we do, and

not because they're devices, but because
they help people.

When I see the smiles on people's faces,
and they say thank you, that's when I say,

"Wow, I found my calling in life from
my injury!"

Nice to meet you, ABILITY!