(TechnAbility Exchange - Tom Dekker)


About the Author

(Revised November, 2000)

 

(note:  This page is slowly but surely being revised, now that I've discovered the wonderful world of Microsoft Front Page and web publishing.  As of this writing, I am in the process of relocating to Toronto, with plans to start work in mid-January.  We now return you to the original program!)


To summarize briefly, I arrived in the world at Brantford Ontario Canada in March of 1952, about two and a half months ahead of schedule. Indeed, it was my temporary residence in an incubator which caused the retinal damage.  But I have managed to survive quite happily.

From 1958 to 1970, I attended the Ontario School for the Blind, now known as the W. Ross McDonald school. Then, there was a year at a local mainstream highschool to complete grade 13, the fifth year of Ontario secondary school. Two years at University of Toronto convinced me that I didn't really want to be there, so I left in the spring of '72.

For several years after that, I got very much involved with being a professional musician, something I had always wanted to do more than going to school. For a couple of years I was on the road with some musical friends from W. Ross. Then, when we all got tired of that in 1975, I went to Fanshawe College of Applied Arts and Technology in London Ontario, where I completed a three-year program in Recorded Music Production. Then I was off to Toronto again, where I discovered that breaking into the music business was no easy task.

At about the same time (summer of '78), I got involved with the local blind consumer group, where I started hearing about a lot of technology for blind people to which I hadn't previously given much thought.   During my time with that group, BOOST (Blind Organization of Ontario with Self-help Tactics), I worked on a couple of "technology awareness" projects, including production of a published report entitled "Applications of Technology in Employment of Blind and Visually Impaired People". This work eventually resulted in the contact that landed me my first mainstream job -- a telephone switch software tester with Mitel Corporation of Ottawa.

With job offer in hand, I was thus qualified to receive some interesting technology from the rehab folks -- a tape-based VersaBraille and Optacon with typewriter attachment. I didn't know the first thing about connecting the VersaBraille to all the things they wanted me to use at Mitel, but luckily I found myself in a lab full of techies who rose to the challenge of "making the blind guy's weird computer work". Fortunately, they taught me as they went, so it turned out to be a rare opportunity for an "unofficial" bit of techie-type training.

After two years at Mitel, I was really getting to dislike Ottawa; it was much less lively than Toronto where most of my good friends still were. Furthermore, I found myself spending more time on the phone helping other blind people to get their VB's on line and less time doing Mitel work. So in the fall of '82, I decided to move back to Toronto and have a go at access technology consulting. Thus, TechnAbility Services came into being.

TechnAbility was a company named after the concept it promoted -- providing technology along with the ability to gain maximum personal benefit from it.

Concurrent to the process of getting TBS up and running, I discovered a loose-knit group of blind computer users who had been meeting informally to discuss issues related to computer and information access. So I got them going on the idea that we would accomplish more if we could formalize the group and get people networked more effectively.

Enter VITA (Visually Impaired for Technological Advancement). Though not the most organized group in the disability movement, VITA brought together an awful lot of people for the first time -- users, teachers, blind students and their parents' groups, government and private agencies, employers, etc. And though the group finally folded later in the '80's, it did so because many of the key players ended up with full-time employment as a direct result of the group's activities. The effects of VITA can be seen today, merely by checking out the number of blind and visually impaired people who now work as access technology specialists for post-secondary educational facilities around Ontario. So this is some of the stuff from which TechnAbility history is made.

Unfortunately, as things were just becoming somewhat successful and stable, the "consulting firm aspect" of TechnAbility met an untimely demise. Through the advent of speech technology combined with more powerful computers (arrival of the IBM PC and MS/DOS), the system that TechnAbility had based its success on became obsolete virtually over-night.

Admittedly, I hadn't been smart enough to foresee this eventuality and wasn't financially prepared when it finally came about. So, the prohibitive cost of updating equipment, combined with the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services' (MCSS) failure to provide even minimal support to one of its existing and experienced trainer/consultants, meant that we couldn't acquire the equipment to move ahead with the times. Apparently, they didn't see the value of facilitating a technology transfer that would have allowed me to continue working with my existing client base so that we could all move to the newer technology. I suppose it was a bureaucratic decision typical of the time i.e. technology was new for everybody and there still weren't enough actual users involved at the decision-making level.

So the training and consulting component of TechnAbility "went underground" in a rather amusing way. The principal partner, yours truly, was hired in the fall of '86, to fill a one-year contract position as "Assistive Technology Instructor" trainee in the Technical Aids department at CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) in Toronto.

Ironically enough, The position was funded by the same Government Ministry who hadn't seen the sense of keeping TechnAbility up and running. But things still worked out for the best. Though I didn't get the new equipment I had originally requested, I ended up with not only a year's worth of training in "new MS/DOS computers, but also a lot of valuable experience from an agency perspective, dealing with consumers and government, working at a major technology support center to boot!

Also in the fall of '86, two blind fellows with considerable computer experience decided to establish their own access technology company which they called Frontier Computing. Frontier experienced considerable growth during its first year of operation, as the first such Canadian company completely owned and operated by blind people -- people who knew first-hand what their peers needed and deserved in terms of a community-oriented, "Total Solution company.

So, when my contract at CNIB ended in the fall of 1987, I became the first full-time employee hired by the original Frontier partners, Chris Chamberlin and John Ogilvie. Aside from the usual demos, consultations, quote preparation and training, I was responsible for organizing and presenting "Networking and Resources Seminars.

Rather than being high power sales events per se, these seminars provided two important kinds of opportunity. The first was to give people lots of hands-on with the technology in an informal, yes, even playful setting. The second allowed discussion among people from widely diverse areas regarding issues pertaining to more effective application of Assistive technologies within the user community.

Finally, in 1993, I went to New York City to establish Frontier's first US office. Unfortunately, we made the fatal error of assuming that the Commission for the Blind and Visually Handicapped of New York State would be as enlightened and progressive as Federal and Provincial governments in Canada. How wrong we were!

So, after a US$60,000 investment from Frontier Canada and with no support from the local social service system, the company in NYC was finally shut down in the summer of '95. This was despite an incredible demand for services expressed by the local population i.e. imagine an access technology store front operation centrally located in Manhattan, a population of 18 million within commuting distance via excellent public transit, to which three states (NY, NJ and CT)? could have referred consumers! But as it turned out, CT and NJ don't really like New York, and the NYS CBVH was not consumer-driven enough to facilitate Frontier's survival despite an outstanding track record in Canada and the services it would have been able to offer locally in New York City.

Once I stopped selling computers for Frontier, I was then able to become a private vendor, providing training and consulting services to CBVH. Indeed, it was the original purpose of this web site to enhance that service.

Toward that end and to satisfy my networking instincts, I started chatting folks up about getting a user group off the ground in NYC. When a lot of them said we needed one and should have it, especially after what happened to Frontier NYC, I designed the original VICUG-NYC home page (Visually Impaired Computer Users Group of NYC) in an attempt to get folks rallied round and get the thing off the ground.

The group has come together slowly but nicely. And the web page has evolved into something amazing, thanks to the generous expertise of one Gregory Rosmaita. So check it out, along with all the links and valuable resources it has to offer, and find out how the TechnAbility process is being further advanced! The group continues with its objectives of increasing membership and networking with other similar groups around the country.

 

If you would be interested in organizing a similar group in Toronto, click here to send me email


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© Copyright 1999 by Tom Dekker
Access Technology Consultant for the Blind and Reading Disabled
Houston, Texas, USA
Telephone: (281) 988-8982
Fax: (281) 530-1740
Email: Dekker@concentric.net



 

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