"The Best Part Is I Can Do It All"

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

At 19, David Young was left paralyzed when he ran his 1965 Chevy Impala into a tree and broke his neck. In the hospital he learned to drive an electric wheelchair and to type using a mouth stick. But he was 27 and a graduate student at the University of Colorado before he got his IBM PC. "It had become painfully obvious that I could no longer match my peers simply by being bright," he recalls. "The computer opened all sorts of doors for me." Now Young is earning a Ph.D. in biology, working as a laboratory consultant and writing more than he ever did when he had the use of his arms and legs. "The best part," he says, "is that I can do it all with no outside help."

Computers, which have changed the way America works, are now becoming available to the 13 million handicapped Americans of working age. In the past, efforts to help the handicapped tended to be overambitious and prohibitively expensive. In one much publicized experiment, quadriplegics have "walked" with crutches or walkers using computer-stimulated electrical impulses to move their stricken legs. But even by the most optimistic estimates, it will be many years before such devices are widely available.

Meanwhile, many social workers and veterans groups are advocating a more modest approach. Rather than using technology to change the patient, they are changing the technology so the patient can use it. "The key words are access, independence and achievement," says Alan Brightman, director of Apple Computer's office of special education. "If you can only wrinkle your eyebrow, I've got a switch that will enable you to input data into a computer. And once you've got access to the machine, you've got access to the world."

In the past year, the number of disabled Americans using computers has doubled to nearly 40,000, and for many of them the difference in their lives has been dramatic. Some examples:

-- Deaf from birth, Marc Hagen, 17, had just about given up on school when his mother brought home an Apple IIe with a modem and showed him how to dial into the 200 or so computer bulletin boards in the Minneapolis area. "It just turned Marc around," reports Dolores Hagen. "Now he can talk to Bangkok if he wants, and if you saw my phone bill, you'd think he was."

-- William Garman, 51, contracted Lou Gehrig's disease in 1982 and within two years was paralyzed, unable to speak or write. Then, last summer, a group of Westinghouse engineers outfitted Garman with an infrared sensor that moves a computer screen's cursor in response to his blinking. For the first time since his illness struck, Garman has been able to communicate with family and friends. His first words, painstakingly spelled out one letter at a time: "Oh boy!"

-- Despite her blindness, Georgia Griffith, 54, graduated from college and became a music teacher. Then she lost her hearing. Now, thanks to a computer and a collection of special tools for the blind, she has made a new career as a proofreader of Braille music. Using the VersaBraille, a machine that produces a raised-dot readout of characters as they appear on a computer screen, she has been able to meet and keep in touch with hundreds of acquaintances on the CompuServe computer network. Says she: "I am deaf and blind, sure, but I am not disabled."

Enabling the disabled involves a variety of modifications, some of them minor, some technological marvels. Scott Luber, whose arm mobility was severely impaired by muscular dystrophy, has worked for three years as an accountant using a miniature computer keyboard and a pair of pencils to reach the keys. People afflicted with cerebral palsy prefer oversize keyboards with hard-to-miss, 2-in.-sq. keys. Quadriplegics, who can move only their heads, are nonetheless able to control a computer by using a mouth-held typing stick or a breath-controlled device called a "sip-and-puff " switch. Blind programmers often learn touch typing so they can enter data in the usual way; to read output they use VersaBrailles, Braille printers or voice synthesizers that pronounce the words in a computer monotone.

Perhaps the most sophisticated aid to the handicapped is an eye-tracking system built by Thomas Hutchinson, a University of Virginia engineer. Using a technology developed for jet-fighter pilots, Hutchinson's device measures the reflection of light from the retina to determine where on a computer display the eye is gazing. A person equipped with the eye tracker simply looks at a command on the screen and the computer executes it. "The last thing to go in the body is the eye muscle," says Hutchinson. "With this system we have an opportunity to free minds that are trapped inside bodies that do not work."

Handicapped computer owners say the machines would be much easier to use if computer makers took their needs into account. One pet peeve: control buttons that must be pressed simultaneously with other keys, causing no end of problems to people whose fingers cannot stretch across a keyboard. Similarly, onscreen visual cues and hand-held pointing devices designed to make computers "user friendly" now threaten to make them inaccessible to the blind.

To avoid such impediments in the future, a task force representing disabled users, researchers and half a dozen computer companies has been meeting under the auspices of the Federal Government. One tangible result: the tiny bumps on the touch-typing "home" keys, which are now standard equipment on all Apple keyboards. "You still have to learn how to type," says Karl Dahlke, a blind software engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Ill. In that regard, however, the able and the disabled are on equal footing -- which is just how the handicapped like things to be.

With reporting by Sam Maddox/Denver and Linda Wiliams/New York, with other bureaus