9UNP0429SD_Gregg Vanderheiden_WordPress

- All right, thank you for joining me for Wednesday Nite at the Lab at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. Tonight, we welcome Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, a professor of industrial and biomedical engineering, as well as the director of Trace R&D Center here at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Dr. Vanderheiden has worked in technology and disability for more than 35 years. He was the pioneer in the field of augmentative communication, a term he coined himself in 1979, and has worked with people with physical, visual, hearing and cognitive disabilities. His work with the computer industry has led to many of the access features that are standard today. So, for example, we think of some access features with computers. So if you have a Macintosh or a PC, the operating systems have incorporated features where, let's say you have a tremor and you're unable to use a mouse that you can actually use the keypad to scroll around. Also, you'll find some of these access features in ATMs or at USPS automated postal stations, Amtrak ticket machines, and in airport terminals. 

So you'll see a lot of his work from him and his team out there in your everyday lives. Dr. Vanderheiden has served on numerous professional, industry and government advisory, as well as planning committees including those such as the FCC, the NSF, NIH and even the White House. He has also received over 30 awards for his work on technology and disability, including the ACM Social Impact Award for the human-computer interaction community. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you, very much. We're going to be talking tonight about a couple things that we're doing at Trace. 

I'll first start off by just introducing a little bit about what Trace Center is, and then we'll be talking about photosensitive epilepsy analysis tool that we developed, and then also some new work that we're just launching on to build accessibility directly into the internet and into the infrastructure of the country. Now the Trace Center is an interdisciplinary center that's focused on ensuring that everyone can access information and communication technology. So we have two rehab engineering research centers, one on information technology and one on telecommunication technology. And the goal is to try to design these very important areas, these emerging areas, so that we're all able to use them as we find them. You'll find access features, as was pointed out, built into every copy of Windows since 1995 and every copy of the Mac operating system since about 1987. We also have crossed disability access features. If you go to the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, the postal stations, as was mentioned, Amtrak. We've also done a lot of work in web accessibility and in trying to create guidelines so the national, international guidelines for web accessibility. We did a lot of work, it was based on the work that was originally done here at the center. And it was actually out of this work that the photosensitive epilepsy tool came into being. 

There were rules in the past that talked about trying to make sure that web content, etc, was accessible and it didn't cause seizures, but there was no tools, there was nothing you could actually use to measure it, and so we set forth to try to get a tool and cause something to be free. So the problem is that people who have photosensitive seizure disorders can have seizures triggered by flashing content. This can be on television or it can be on computer screens and the seizures can be the grand mal seizures where somebody actually, you've seen this, this is what you normally think of as having a seizure, but it can also take the form where somebody is just watching it and all the sudden they just seem to go away for a while and they come back and they don't even know they had a seizure, they just missed information. And so this can be bad in general, but as we're doing more and more work on computers and this kind of thing, it can actually cause individuals to be missing information and be missing out, and they don't even know it that they are having these seizures. Probably the most famous case was in Japan where they showed a Pokemon cartoon and sent about 300 children to the hospital. And then that night they showed it on the evening news and they sent another 300 children to the hospital. So I think it was the same station, the same television station, decided to show on the news, and I don't know if they were saying, see it's not so bad. I don't know. But we'll actually get a little clip of that. So we set out to try to figure out how to adapt this. 

Now tools existed for television. They had been developed by Graham Harding, who is a long-time researcher in epilepsy, working with the Cambridge Research Associates. And they had developed a tool that they could use. It was about $30,000 and it was used by television stations to try to figure out how to make television programs that were safe. But we needed something that would work on computers. A television is small and at the other end of room, whereas the computer screens are larger and very close. So the danger is different. So we worked with Harding and the Cambridge Research Associates to adapt the algorithms to apply to larger screens in closer viewing distances. And then we also purchased the rights, since the only way you could get this was a $30,000 tool, and we needed something that people were able to use on any of the computer screens, anybody who was making web content. So we wanted to have a tool that was free. 

So we bought underlying rights from them, and then we used that in adapting the new algorithms that we did, and then we released the tool for free. So we created the Trace Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool, which is now available, you can download it for free on the internet. So this is a tool that you can download. And we'll just demonstrate it by looking at some sample material. So I'm going to open a file, and then I just push the button and what it does is it's going to analyze. So now it's analyzing the video. You can see the video small down here in the corner. It's small enough that it won't be of any danger to anyone. And you can make it really small if you want to. And as it's playing, it's being analyzed. 

And here you can see the failures, massive failures. This, by the way, is the Pokemon cartoon that caused all the seizures. And then they have some other kinds of things. There's actually a sensitivity to patterns as well. So we have the zebras in the striped patterns can cause failure as you can see here as well. And lots of large flashing. We have some honeybees with stripes. Here's interesting, you see lots of stripes on here but there's no danger on this. You come in here just for a brief second, the cans gave it. So it is now run through the clip and down here you can see a stripe and you can see all of the places where there's either failures or warnings. 

I can turn off the warning here. And you can see the places where there's failures. And then I can just go through like this and step through. If I want to I can step through one frame at a time and watch the flashing. So there's a flash and another flash and another one. Now one of the things they also found out was that they were actually finding that the seizure rates were much higher than they had expected. And so they went back to try to find out why they were having seizures and were more sensitive to this than would ordinarily have been thought. And what they found was that, in fact, we're much more sensitive to saturated red flashing. Now if you know how the eye works, you actually have three sensors in your eye and they overlap so that for all of the colors your brain actually can determine what color it is by taking what the three sensors receive and adding and subtracting the signals. And so depending upon the balance between the three signals, it can figure out. 

So for all colors except saturated red, it's basically taking multiple signals and subtracting them from each other. So you have both an exciting and inhibiting activity in the brain. But when you get all the way out to the fully saturated red, you don't have anything but exciting, the sensors. You're off the end and there's only one sensor and you're just banging on it. And so it turns out that we're much more sensitive to flashing of saturated red color. And so because of this accident, they were actually able to track down and to refine it. So you can see on the tool the ability to go through. You can go through at whatever rate you wish. You can see where they are. And this one has got so many, but very often, for example, you may go through a movie and the only place that you have a failure would be where somebody takes a machine gun and aims it at the camera and starts firing and you're basically looking at machine gun flashes. 

Or where you just have lightning flashes. So the whole movie is going through and the only place that's a real problem is they have a place where they've got lightning flashing and the whole scene is flashing. And so the lightning flashes, say, four times. Well it turns out that the real danger is in the repeated flashing. If you just had to down to, say, two lightning flashes, then, in fact, it wouldn't cause the same problem. So you can just go through and edit the film so that it flashes and you just get a couple lightning flashes instead of three. Or with the machine gun, you can just take the contrast down. Instead of going white, black, white, black, it goes white, gray, white, gray. So you still have the same flashing, but you don't have the same contrast between the black and the white. We also are looking at the possibility of taking and building into a chip the circuitry that would be fast enough that it would be able to detect this in realtime, and if we could integrate that basically into sets, it could be that you could have a television set where if you wanted to, just like you turn the captions on, you could turn on the flash detection. 

And then when you're watching a movie, whenever it would do this, it would actually detect it in realtime, and then it can do one of several things, all of which would prevent a seizure. By the way, the worst thing to do if you're sensitive to epilepsy is if you see flashing, close your eyes because it turns out that closing your eyes actually can cause the seizure. So it's actually better to cover one eye or to put on red glasses or there are different kinds of things, but the reaction, of course, naturally, is to just close your eyes which is not a good idea. But one of the things you can do if we have the auto-detecting tool would be to detect the flashing and then we can either, you've ever watched digital television where all of a sudden you just sort of see it freeze for a second and then it continues on. So you could do that. So if there was machine gun flashing, you could just have it freeze for a second and go on. But you could also do a lot of things that are less obtrusive than that. For example, you could have it when it detects the flashing, it could just take the contrast down. And you may not even notice it in the movie the fact that instead of having a really bright flash it went to a white and a gray kind of flashing. We could also change the tint. 

So we could go through and just do a shift to the lower frequencies. So just look during the flashing like maybe it was a little off-color for a little bit and then it would come back. And, again, it may not be something you'd ever notice. The action wouldn't change. You'd see it. It's just that whatever it was that was causing the signal to be particularly provocative would be reduced so that it wouldn't be a threat to you. So contrast, taking out some of the flashing, changing the color balance are all things that could be done. So this is something that's being talked about, and it's something that, with funding, could be done. Right now we actually had to reallocate some funds, etc, to get this part done. But we have the tool now, as I said the tool is available on the web to be downloaded and used. 

The other area that we have begun working in is looking at building access into the information infrastructure. Now, at one time we had a situation where all of this new gadgetry was coming out. We had computers, we had laptops, we have PDAs, desktop laptops, fancy cell phones, and if you wanted to you could pretty much just ignore it. You could just get along, go live in a world, you didn't have to be connected to the internet, you didn't have to have a computer, etc. But we're very rapidly getting to a point where access to information technologies is no longer optional. For example, many companies only take applications, job applications, online. If you're not online, you can't even apply for a job. We're now doing more and more health information is online. More emergency alerts, they will tell you to go online to get more information about this. Health alerts, health information, is now being more and more put online and they're using this as a way. 

Benefits. And then even shopping. There's things where there used to be things available in stores, more and more specialty stores are disappearing because the information and shopping will be online and the stores that are not selling large volumes of things find that they can't survive anymore. So more and more were going up online. We'll even find civic participation. They're talking about voting. People have gone into vote who've never touched a computer in their lives. And they go in and here's a computer sitting there in front of them and they're supposed to use it to vote. And this can be very confusing if the only screen you've ever seen has been a television screen. And you don't go up and touch television screens, you don't interact with television screens. 

It's like a movie theatre, you don't expect to sit in a movie theatre and talk and all of the sudden have the actors turn and start carrying on a conversation with you. But that would be no more startling to some individuals then having something that looks like a television set that you're supposed to go up and touch and it's going to actually change and interact with you and that's how you're supposed to vote. So we need to be looking at how we're going to create and how we're going to make the next generation information systems accessible to people as individuals. There are now, this is the new iPad that some of you have heard about from Apple Computer. And this is now being used more and more and they're talking about using it in healthcare because it's so convenient, doctors can kick it around from the bed sides. I've had a number of calls from people saying, gee, my wife just came out of an operation and she can't talk anymore and she won't be talking for the next week or so, how can she communicate? And it's very easy to take things like this and give people the ability to communicate. These things will even talk. This one is the iPad from Apple, and it even has accessibility built directly into it. 
- Double tap to open. 

- So that you can, in fact, even use this even if you can't see. 
- Settings, notes, iBooks. 
- So this is a book. 
- iBooks, library, table, font, search. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. To her great disappointment, it was empty. 
- So you can actually have things that will read to you. 
- Voice-over off. 
- They also have things like this that they're talking about using these in universities and colleges to eliminate books. Instead of having to carry around, my son just started in college and he goes off with about 40 pounds worth of books in a backpack, and instead this is a pound and a half and it will hold 40,000 books. 

So the ability to have everything that you want with you. And they can interact and you can access all of the information on the web. And, and, and. So if this is where we're heading and this is what the students are going to be using, how are we going to participate in the classes? How are people who have disabilities, people who aren't used to technology going to be able to access and use these? So we need to figure out how to get access to everyone if they're going to be able to participate in the world as it's evolving. But it turns out that there aren't access solutions even available for everything. There are screen readers and things like this that allow people who are blind to use computers, but the screen readers are often quite technical in nature. And they only work if you happen to be blind and very sharp and technically-oriented. And that doesn't describe the entire population. 

And so how are the rest of us going to be able to access and use all of these different types of information. We also have people with learning disabilities, cognitive language and learning disabilities, that we have to be addressing, and we've only begun to address those areas. So we really need to be looking at developing a much broader range of technologies in order to address and provide access to everyone to these technologies. And it's really all too complex. Every time a new operating system comes out. I work and my colleagues are all bright, they're engineers, they're computer scientists, they're all technically-oriented, and they still complain when we get the new Office, for example, Microsoft Office. And they can't figure out how to deal with the ribbons. I was trying to make a change in my PowerPoint slide, and I was doing it on the Mac and I loaded it over on the Windows machine so I could do this and I had to make a change. And I spent 15 minutes and I could not figure out how to change the font. So if people with high intelligence, high technical quotient, bright, capable, they love technology, are having trouble with all these technologies, what about the other 98% of the population? 

And this is a real problem. We're finding that computers are way too complex; the technologies are too complex. They're too complex for users; they're too complex for the libraries. We have libraries that provide public access computers. Unfortunately, if you have a disability, they're not accessible because it's too complicated to try and figure out all the different types, degrees, and combinations of disabilities, the different types of assistive technologies and the government is the same thing when they talk about trying to provide things. So we need to figure out how to make this all much, much simpler. There are many, many people who would love to be able to communicate in email with their grandchildren and yet to use the email programs and the web browsers and the computers to get at what is a really simple thing, I just want to send a little electronic mail back and forth, it's way, way more complicated than they are able to handle. Chatting, audio/video, etc. It's possible for us to create systems that are very simple and straightforward and that would allow people to be able to exchange mail, to be able to chat, to be able to exchange photographs with grandchildren and children, etc, and all this can be done but it's not in place. We have to figure out how to get these kinds of things in place. 

Another problem we found is that it's just too scary. There's a lot of individuals who won't go anywhere near the net, get on broadband, because they have heard about all of the terrible things that can happen to you. Identities being stolen, getting into your bank accounts, things like this. And they've also heard about all the stuff that can come at you. People who just signed up for a simple little email account to email and all the sudden they're getting stuff in their email that they didn't know anybody would ever mail to anybody else and they're getting it in their mail, pretty nasty stuff. And so they just plain get away from it all. So we need to figure out how to be able... Got a problem? 
- It just went off. 
- Oh, we just lost the audio. 

(inaudible)
 Tap the mic? Fixed it, it's back. Thank you, very much. So we need to figure out ways of creating infrastructure that can allow people who want to get on to the internet to be able to get on to it to access the things they want to and still do it in a safe fashion. Another big problem we have is that there are solutions, ways for people to get on, and people are not aware of them. And so another big problem we have is just awareness. And then, finally, affordability. There are many individuals, for example, who are blind and you can get computer for $500 that will last you for years, and a good screen reader may cost a thousand dollars. So you can get a computer that goes for five years for a couple or few hundred dollars. 

An adaptation to allow it to be used by somebody who is blind costs a thousand dollars and is good for eight months and needs to be upgraded because the technologies on the web are changing so fast that you have to keep updating the screen readers to be able to keep up with them. There's a real problem with affordability. There's a lot of people who can't afford that kind of a thing. So we need to find good solutions for that as well. One of the things that we've done to is begun an international effort to do what we call raising the floor. And this is putting the web within the reach of all of those who have disability, literacy, or aging related barriers, regardless of their economic status. So can we make it so that everybody who can access the internet, if they have a disability or an aging related problem, they can also access the internet without having this penalty. So imagine an individual who's blind who would be able to go up to any computer and when they walked up to the computer it would just start talking and they would be able to use it. So instead of having to buy a special computer, install special things on it, they could use my computer, this computer, the computer at the one, the one at their children's house, any computer they came across. They could sit down to and it would begin to talk and work with them. 

Imagine somebody who is older and who is confused by technology, but wherever they went, any computer they sat down to, it would instantly change into one that was very simple. And so it wouldn't have pull down menus and scroll bars, and anything like this. All it would have is it would have a picture of a mailbox, a picture of a phone directory and a little address book and little picture of a picture album. And if they touched the mailbox, if they had any mail, when they had mail the mailbox would light up and a flag would come up so they knew that they had some mail so they could just look and see, ah, I have some. They would click on it and the mail would spill out on the desk. They would just touch it with their finger on the screen. They would touch the mail, it would open up, and they could read the mail, they could just turn the pages like they would turn it. And there's a button right at the bottom that says, would you like to reply? You'd say, yes. Touch it, you could type the message back and it would go. 

Just very simple. All things that look like and behave like what you're used to in the real world. If you touch the address book, it would come up. And it's got little tabs. You can turn it to the B tab and there's your kids that start with B. And next to their names there's a little picture of mail, a letter, and if you wanted to write them a letter. Or there's a phone and you could just touch the phone and it would call them. And when you're talking to them, if you wanted to, you'd be able to see each other so that you could actually have a video, a face-to-face conversation, see the grandkids. And you could even have chat. I know one grandmother who said that she now chats with the little kids on their phones and they're sending little messages back and forth and she can sit on her computer and they think that she's the greatest Granny in the world because she understands all this technology and can chat right back with them and they don't know that she's just got a really simple, easy to use version of the fancy programs that they have. 

And then the picture album. They touch that and you can see pictures. And anybody, any of the kids anywhere in the world can actually add pictures to their album, but they just show up on their desk and they can go through and look. And that's it. Very simple. Very straightforward. None of the complexity of computers. And when they walk away from the computer, it turns back into a complex computer. When we go up to a new one, all they do is they take a little bitty thing, it sort of looks like this. Sits on their key chain. 

Just a little thing. All these computers have a little jack that looks like this, it's called a USB. And all they have to do is just stick it in there, and that computer changes into their computer so that they don't have to even own a computer. They go to the library, their computer shows up. They go to their kid's house, their computer shows up with their email and their book. It follows them wherever they go. 
- 
(inaudible)
 
- There you go. 

Talk about that later. You can have somebody who is afraid of the internet and won't go anywhere near it, but they would be able to use it but it would present a safe, simple environment that would only go to the kinds of things that they're interested in and it would not allow any of the other stuff to get to them so that they would be able to go on, do something like the one we just talked about and they could actually use the internet but they could use it on their terms. A person who is deaf, who goes up and tries to watch movies and there's the little closed caption button and they click it and there's no captions. But often there are captions some place. And so if we set the infrastructure up right, we could make that if you push and the captions aren't there, it would automatically search the entire world and determine if there was any captions for this anywhere and bring them and show them to you. And you don't have to know how to search the internet, you don't have to know how to do all of this stuff that some of these high techie people know how to do. It would just do it for you, bring the captions up for you. And if you want them in a different language, you could actually select a language, and if they weren't available in that language, there are translation programs on the internet that will translate it into other languages. So if it wasn't your native language, you'd have a chance of seeing that. We have college students here who have disabilities, and they have to use different computers all over campus. 

So each different department college has their own computers. Now, I'm sitting here and the computer that's built into this podium is a Macintosh. When I go over to across the street, when I go up to give a presentation, the computer that's built in will be a PC. I go into some computer labs and they will have Linux. So they have all these different computers, different operating systems, different versions, and if you have a disability, how are you going to get all of your access stuff built into all of these different computers in all these different places? So this is a real problem. Again, if we can make it so that when a person approaches a computer, the access comes to them, their access shows up on whatever computer, then they can, in fact, be able to survive on the campus. And then there are people who can't afford a computer, they can't afford a connection to the internet, and they go to the library. Now libraries are very powerful places. There's also other computer centers around where they have computers where people can go and sit down and use them. 

But, again, you have to be able to use the computers as you find them. There's not going to be any adaptations. So many of us who have one type of disability or another or are getting older and having trouble using the computers, that's not going to work for us. This is something that's now happening and that is that there are some people who have to actually live in a world which we call cloud computing. They go to a company and nobody has their own computer, there are just computers around like there are desks around. And when you work, you sit down at any desk. And you're supposed to work on that desk. In this case, you sit down and you have to work on that computer. And all of the information and software isn't actually on the computer, it's off in the internet some place. And when you sit down on a computer it shows up on whichever machine you're on. 

And it's called cloud computing. And when we have that kind of a situation, you have a disability, you have to be able to work on any computer and so your accessibility has to also be in the cloud. And all of the special techniques and technologies we have today, almost all of them are designed to be installed on one computer and not to be in the cloud. We also have something new that's possible. And that is the ability to call up assistance on demand. Imagine being able to, anytime you want to, have somebody help you, even for 10 seconds. So you come up and you don't know how to use something, you have a person who's blind and on a web page they may come up to a chart and they want to buy a new computer. And the diagram says, so they're reading with their screen reader, and the screen reader can read the words but it can't read pictures. And so the words say comparison of X computer and Y computer for performance. And that's exactly what they want to know but it's a picture. 

So what they can do is they can just click on the picture, have it sent into the internet, if you will, where someone else can look at it, tell them what it says, and then they sign back off. It would be like having somebody right next to you all the time who is, like, turned off, but anytime you want to you just reach over, tap them, they wake up and you say, what does that say? And they tell you and you say, okay, and you turn them back off again. And you only pay for 10 seconds of their time. So we had one where it was interesting. A person was blind was coming up and he came up and he could sort of see and he knew these were the restrooms but he couldn't tell which was the men's room and which was the women's room. And so he just took out his camera. And he just took it and he aimed it and he pushed it. And then he sat there and he waited a few seconds and he pushed it and he says, which one is the men's room? And he waited. 

And within 30 seconds it came back and said, the one on the right. So he said, thank you, and he just went in. And it cost him a penny. It cost him a penny to take that picture, have it sent out. And somebody is out there and they just sit there and they get these little tasks and they just do them and they send them back in. And it's not just for people with disabilities, by the way. I had a friend of mine who said he had the same thing. He was in Japan and they had two restroom doors, and they had nice big Kanji symbols telling you which was the women's and which was the men's. And there was nobody around. He tried to talking to people and they didn't understand what he was saying. 

And so he sent a picture off because he actually had been working on it and got back and figured out which one was the men's room and saving himself a lot of embarrassment. And maybe even getting arrested. He wasn't quite sure what would happen. So we have this ability, cognitive, if you have something that's confusing and you don't understand, the ability to instantly call up and have somebody. These kinds of capabilities are available. And then, finally, we really want to create an infrastructure that allows researchers, students, consumers, and friends to be able to help in developing new types of techniques. Often we will have a researcher who knows a really good way of creating something that would be very helpful to people who are older, for example. And they could sort of develop it, they could write a paper on it, they could publish about it, but it's really, really hard to get stuff out in the commercial sector, to take an idea and actually get it out commercially. But we have things like the iPhone now where you could actually, in that small domain, the iPhone and the iPad, if you want to, any one of you could sit down with somebody who is a programmer and they have tools that make it easy to program, they could write an application for this, and they can load it up and instantly it's available to all of the millions, I think it's 60 million or something, people who use iPhones and there's a million of these things already out there. And as you can see, all of these little dots that you see here, each one of those is a different application that somebody wrote. 

And one of these is the one that we wrote. So we had some researchers and we put something together and we just put it up. And instantly it's available. Anybody can buy it, download it, some of them are free, some of them are 99 cents, some of them are $10. So you can get your idea out. So we can do the same kind of thing around accessibility. And instead of there only being a small number of solutions which are designed by people and often if a company has one product, they don't want to have another product that's anything like it because if there's two of them, people don't know which one of buy and they don't buy either. If you only have one, you actually sell more things if there's not so much choice. Well that's good if you happen to have this particular disability, this need, but if you have this one, you're sort of out of luck. So one of the things that we can do by creating an infrastructure is make is easier for individuals to develop things, for people to say, you know, this is too much. 

I don't want this. I want one that just does this and this. Can you make me one? Yes, fine. I think this would be helpful to other people, put it up and suddenly you have lots and lots of people. Actually I got into this field 39 years ago now just that way. I set out to try and make a communication system for one boy in Madison, and they put it on a telethon to try and help raise money. All of a sudden it turned out that this boy that I thought was so unique, it turns out there were a lot of people who were like this, who had cerebral palsy, couldn't speak or write and had the same type of thing. So the solution we were developing ended up being a solution that was used all over the United States, but we didn't know that and we had no way of getting it out there. This is the kind of thing that we can be building today and the technologies can allow us to do it. 

So what would we do to do this? First of all, we need to build a system that allows people to be able to access, get the access features they need anywhere, anytime, on any computer. And we want to go beyond computers. How many people here have a loved one whose stove or washing machine or something else went out and you couldn't repair it? And you went to try and replace it and you just had to pry it out of their fingers because they didn't want any new fangled thing, they wanted the one they knew how to use. My favorite thing is I always ask, how many people here would like to take your laundry and try to go next door and do your laundry in your neighbor's washing machine? And most people go, I don't have any idea how to set the settings on my neighbor's washing machine. If we can't figure out how to use a washing machine, what's it like for the rest of the people? And as we're getting older, the technology is getting worse and worse. Now, I talked to my mom, my mom is 92, and I was talking to her and I said, you know, Mom, I'm lucky because I grew up when all this technology is being developed so when I get old I won't have any trouble with this stuff. 

And she looked at me and she chuckled and she said, and she's just the sweetest little thing in the world, and she just looks up at me and she says, oh, great and you kids think that you invented sex too. 
(laughter)
 It took me a while to recover from that. Mom? She said, when we were growing up that's exactly what we told our folks. We said, you're having trouble with this technology, we won't have this trouble. When we grow up, we're growing up with the technology so we're not going to have any trouble. She says, Gregg, when you grow up, the technologies they're going to throw at you isn't going to look anything like the technologies that you're using today. And a book just came out the other day, a couple years back, by Vernor Vinge, and I really recommend that you read it. It's called "Rainbows End." 

He's actually a computer science professor, retired now. And he's a futurist. And almost all of his books end up getting Hugo or Nebula or whatever awards. This one is about a man who gets Alzheimer's and descends into dementia. And then they discover a cure for it later. And they can't cure it all but they can cure the kind he has. So he comes back up but it's been 15 or 20 years. And he has lost all of that time. So he went from being a very bright, capable, I think he was a poet, and he comes back up and the technology is all, and the time he goes down is today and he comes up in the future. And so we all get to come up with him into a future of technologies, and it's really fascinating to listen and see what technologies would be like and try to imagine what it would be like for us to suddenly jump into that. 

And it is daunting. So I really recommend it. It's Rainbows End. So how do we develop something that will allow us to be able to, on any machine we go to, have it present something which we can handle and which can stay stable over time? We also need to have a mechanism so I can get this wherever I am, but how does it know what I need? And so the second thing is a secure personal preference and permission system that basically allows us to go up to any machine. So I would like it that when I went up to not only the computer, but when I went up to a stove or an oven or a washing machine, that in fact it could present an interface that I understood. It would present it in a font that I could read. If I were blind, most all ovens now have touch screen kinds of controls on them, and so if you're blind you're basically out of luck, but they don't have to be, they can be accessible. We have all the things we just showed you before that we have done, the postal stations and stuff, they all can be used even if you're completely blind. 

So how do we, we should make it so we have a system so that anything we come up to, it doesn't know who we are, we can give it something that it will find out our preferences without having to tell us who we are and adapt to fit our needs. Or Library of Congress, for example, if you're entitled to talking books for the blind, it would let you have access to those. An evaluation wizard that would be real simple. You could just sit down, you could through a series of exercises that would show you a book, and it would say, adjust the font size to the size that you find easy to read. So you'd adjust it. And then it would remember that, put it in your personal preference profile and then whenever you sat down to read something, it would automatically be in that size that you find easy to read. A central trusted place that you could get these special access software from. It turns out that anytime you have software that is helping make your interface friendly, it means that that software can see your interface. And anything you have that provides an alternate interface to you, if it's nasty it can also watch everything you're doing and take your credit card numbers and everything else. So anytime you have special input, special interface software, it has to be very carefully screened, you have to get it from some place you trust because otherwise people will sell you very, very nice, very friendly software that will steal you blind. 

The metadata system we talked about that will automatically find the captions and bring them to you. The assistance on demand infrastructure so that you can have whatever type of assistance that you want anytime, anywhere. We talked about the ability to have open source royalty-free components to build this stuff from so that we can get a much greater variety. For example, we talked about people being able to create their own. A lot of the parts are hard to make but if the components are all there, then it's possible for researchers at the university here, for example, to be creating new solutions which then become widely available. And awareness, making sure that people are aware of the fact that these things exist. And so there's many different models that we could talk about, and I won't go into them now. They're just different approaches and techniques for being able to provide access. Thank you. 
(applause)