Sustainable Assistive Technology

In December 2012, I provided over forty hours of volunteer Assistive Technology training and support for an institution serving the blind in Honduras. It was then that I started considering this concept of sustainable assistive technologies. So much development aid is about providing something to help those who truly suffer in the developing world. What is the result when the foreign volunteers leave or the equipment stops working? The locals do not have the expertise or the financial resources to get the item repaired and it goes unused or discarded. This problem faces every non-governmental organization or volunteer group that attempts to provide support to those in the developing world. When I finished volunteering in December, I knew I wanted to do something. I immediately thought of all the typical ways that you might consider helping, raising money for newer computers, refreshable Braille displays, licenses of JAWS, etc. Then I realized that these solutions might provide some help in the immediate short term but would not address the long term assistive technology needs of the institution. I realized that their JAWS licenses would expire, the refreshable Braille displays would stop working and the computers would become outdated or corrupted with malware and other hardware problems. I know this first-hand because I ensured that their Index Everest D V4 got repaired. I got to consider this concept of sustainable assistive technology. In my mind, this is no different than sustainable technology. I began considering what I could do to help that the technology trainer could support easily independently. Then I thought about what might make the most impact without burdening the people I'm trying to help. I put together an image that can be easily deployed to a USB thumb drive that is less than 1 GB and can be run on any PC. Most Hondurans do have access to a PC, either at home, a family members home, internet café or school. The USB thumb drive plugs in and without installing anything loads a copy of NVDA already localized in Spanish with a Spanish synthesizer. The user is then presented with a menu, again in Spanish, with firefox web browser, thunderbird E-mail client, Instantbird Instant Messenger client and OpenOffice suite. This provides the user an accessible environment to work from because all the preferences and documents are saved on the users thumb drive. This is sustainable assistive technology because thumb drives in lower capacities like 1 GB; 2 GB are affordable even in Honduras. Also the technology teacher was provided training on how to use and deploy the thumb drive image. This enables her to provide her students either donated thumb drives or to install the image on student's personal thumb drives. This sustainable assistive technology has vast potential to change many lives and because the image is based around open source, there are no licenses to renew or keep current. When the person who is blind is finished, they exit the application and remove the USB thumb drive, nothing is left on the computer they were using, now every PC they encounter will be accessible.