She spies Kevin Murphy's booth and is excited by one more innovative solution. His overlay of Lego-style blocks, each sporting a plastic replica of a Braille letter or word offers a new way for an unusual child to communicate. By pressing the Lego block sideways, a child can indicate that she wants a drink of water or has identified the letter “r” when the block activates the synthesized speech its location triggers.

        Technology has long been recognized as the single greatest equalizer and liberator for people with disabilities, but finding the right product for a given need can be mind-boggling for any teacher, employer or therapist trying to match a technological solution with a given individual need.

A crucial conference

        The annual “Technology and Persons with Disabilities” conference, hosted by the California State University at Northridge Center on Disability, has become a pinnacle opportunity to see the newest and most innovative hardware and software available and to learn from others how to mix and match products and applications for the best solutions.

        More than 4,000 people last week attended the 17th annual conference, known throughout the industry simply as CSUN (pronounced C-SUN). Held March 18-23 at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott and Los Angeles Airport Hilton hotels, the conference boasted more than 350 speakers, more than 150 product exhibits and included participants every U.S. state and territory as well as 37 other countries.

        Products large and small, hardware and software offered sometimes remarkable solutions to barriers presented by specific physical or mental disabilities.

        Product demonstrations featured personal data assistants for blind people, an onscreen sign-language translation program to boost literacy among deaf children, an environmental control system enabling a quadriplegic to control everything from the telephone or VCR to light switches and food preparation with as little as the intake of breath.

        There were exhibits of toys for children with limited physical movement that can be operated by a variety of simple switches, word processing programs that speak and highlight text for students with learning disabilities, and a wide array of “augmentative communications” devices, electronic boxes with speech output for kids and adults unable to speak for themselves.

Sponsoring growing

        When the conference began in 1985, it was held on the Northridge campus and drew only a few hundred people, according to Jodi Johnson, associate director of the conference. Today, the event is planned by a full-time staff of four,a part-time staff of 29 and involves a 16-month planning cycle.

        Although Ms. Johnson and other conference organizers feared that attendance might be down this year with more apprehension regarding travel, attendance was higher than ever with a waiting list of exhibitors and presenters.

        Space for exhibits and sessions was added this year, as were new approaches to sharing information. The most exciting change in 17 years, Ms. Johnson says, is probably the nature of sponsorship.

        “In the beginning,” she says, “our sponsors were vendors in the assistive technology field.” Today, sponsors are mainstream technology leaders — Hewlitt-Packard, Compaq, Microsoft and many others.

        “Looking at our sponsors,” Ms. Johnson says, “it's clear that this issue is now recognized as part of the mainstream, considered by all companies as an important part of the overall picture.”

        Plans for CSUN 2003 began four months ago. Next year's event will take place in the same hotels, March 17-22. For more information, or to read proceedings from this year's event, visit CSUN at www.csun.com and click on Center on Disabilities.

       Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.

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