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2.The Internet and AAC

The Internet and its precocious offspring, the World Wide Web, are in the spotlight. Open a newspaper or magazine or turn on the television, and there’s a story about the Internet. It’s a hot topic. It’s so hot that the United States government wants to regulate it and businesses want to put advertisements on it. Every month thousands of people hook up their home computers to telephone lines so they can work, play and share information with other people who live just down the block or halfway around the world.

In the beginning

The ideas of linking computers started with the United States Department of Defense in the 1970s. They wanted to make sure they could share information in a national crisis. The first computer network was very small; it connected only seven computers across the country. Then the National Science Foundation got interested in communicating and sharing data by computers. Colleges and universities wanted in on the act, and soon just plain folks were getting on-line. And here we are today with millions of people sharing data and ideas with other people all over the world.

Should I get on the Net?

What does all this have to do with augmented communicators?

Plenty. According to a report from the Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin, ¹ these are some of the advantages the Information Superhighway may bring to people with disabilities:

• "Drastically increasing the ability for individuals with some types for disabilities to access and use information.
• Decreasing the personal isolation that some individuals experience because of restrictions in their ability to move about, to communicate, or to easily congregate with others sharing their interests and situation.
• Improving self-image, by allowing individuals to interact with others in a way which makes their disability invisible or irrelevant.
• Providing opportunities to participate in distance learning programs or receive medical services from a remote location when travel is difficult."

That is what’s possible now and in the near future. The same document also gives some hints about what else may be possible someday:

• "Individuals with mobility or travel impairments will be able to do their shopping, learning, travel, medical services and work from their homes or other facilities.
• This new "mobility" can open horizons for living and learning on all levels and allow individuals to "travel," tour caverns and explore other environments.
• Individuals with physical manipulation difficulties could use simulations or virtual environments to participate in activities they wouldn’t otherwise be physically able to do. For example, an individual with severe athetoid cerebral palsy cannot easily construct mechanisms, operate delicate instruments, and carry out chemical experiments in the laboratory using fragile glassware. However, if the mechanisms, instruments and glassware were all simulations on the screen (or in a virtual environment), these individuals would be able to participate in such activities using keyboard control or whatever interface worked best for them."

Enough of this pie in the sky business, what can you do on the Internet right now?

E-mail

One of the most popular services on the Internet is electronic mail or e-mail.

A recent study of augmented communicators and e-mail suggests that there are beneficial results from the use of e-mail by AAC users. The main purpose for this study, conducted by Pamela Mathy of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was to examine the effects of electronic communication on opportunities for social interaction by people who rely on AAC. The study showed that e-mail has three distinct benefits over other types of communication:

• Messages are sent by text, not by voice.
• Messages can be constructed off-line and uploaded to the on-line service, allowing the augmented communicator to become a more equal participant in a conversation.
• On-line costs can be kept down by going on-line only during the time text is being sent or received." ²

The participants in this study were asked to evaluate their on-line experiences by ranking a series of fifteen statements on a scale of one to seven, one being strong agreement and seven being strong disagreement. Here are the statements, which evoked the strongest agreement among the participants:

• Having access to electronic mail has given me more control over my life than I had before.
• Using electronic communication has helped me connect with people who have similar interests to my own who I would not have been able to meet otherwise.
• I enjoy exchanging electronic mail with people I have met via electronic communication.
• Electronic communication services would help people who have physical disabilities gain more control over their lives.
• Presently, I find electronic mail a more rewarding way to keep in touch with family and friends than using the telephone.

With e-mail there are no post offices to deal with, no stamps to lick or envelopes to seal and no long lines to stand in. A person, who is communicating by e-mail addresses a message, writes what he wants to say and then sends it flying across cyberspace to the intended recipient without ever leaving his computer. The e-mail is received within minutes or hours. It’s not like sending a letter through the postal service, where each transaction takes days or weeks to accomplish.

Discussion groups

Life would be pretty boring on the Internet if all you could do is send messages to individuals. Fortunately, you can send messages to whole groups of people. Yes, this makes possible the electronic equivalent of junk mail, but it also makes possible one of the things that makes the Internet so interesting: discussion groups.

There are three basic types of discussion groups on the Internet:

• LISTSERVs
• Majordomos
• Newsgroups

A LISTSERV is an automated computer program that handles getting people on and off discussion groups, as well as posting individual responses to the various discussion groups as they are received. A LISTSERV can handle many discussion groups at a time. A LISTSERV at a university might have several hundred mailing lists on it. Discussion groups on a LISTSERV are called mailing lists because the LISTSERV sends e-mail written by the subscribers of a mailing list to all the other subscribers of that list. To get on a LISTSERV discussion group that interests you, you must "subscribe" to it. Just send an e-mail message to the LISTSERV and tell it what mailing list you want to be on. There is almost never a charge to subscribe.

For example, I am on a mailing list called ACOLUG that discusses AAC from a user perspective. To join this list and become part of the discussion, I sent an e-mail message addressed to LISTSERV@vm.temple.edu. For the text of my message I wrote: subscribe ACOLUG Michael Williams. Then I sent the message. That’s it. Later I got some e-mail saying I had subscribed to the ACOLUG mailing list, along with an instruction sheet about the list. I saved this because it has many useful tips about the list if I ever get stuck.

How would you get off a mailing list if you didn’t like it? It’s easy. I just repeat the steps above, only in the body of the message I write: signoff ACOLUG.

Majordomo is another mailing list handler. It serves the same function as a LISTSERV, getting people on and off mailing lists; however, it differs from a LISTSERV in the way you get on and off a mailing list. I am on another list called Berkeley-disabled that talks about the Berkeley, California disabled community. Here’s how I got on it: I sent an e-mail message to: majordomo@berkeleysys.com. I left the subject line blank. In the body of my message I wrote the following: subscribe Berkeley-disabled mbwill@well.com, which is the name of the list followed by my e-mail address. I did not follow it with my name. If I ever want to get off this list, I will repeat the steps for getting on, but in the body of my message I will write: unsubscribe Berkeley-disabled mbwill@well.com

As you can see, LISTSERVs and majordomos work in almost the same way, but with subtle differences. It’s things like this that drive new users of the Internet up a wall and keep other potential users off the net completely.

Another type of Internet discussion group is called a newsgroup. Internet newsgroups are like mailing lists that have gotten too big for their britches. Popular newsgroups may get several hundred new postings per day. Because of this high volume it is impossible to e-mail the messages in the newsgroups out to individual subscribers. As a result, newsgroups are read on-line with a piece of software called a newsreader. Because newsgroups need to be read on line, they are impractical for those of us who need more time to do things. There are tons of newsgroups on the Net, and by the time you figure out how to use your newsreader and flip through several newsgroups trying to find one that interests you, you will look at the clock and notice it’s many hours later and on-line charges have eaten up many of your dollars. The moral of this story is those newsgroups are not for the faint-hearted or novice net surfer.

The World Wide Web

Started a few years ago by hardcore computer fanatics, the World Wide Web has grown from a small sideshow attraction into the hottest spot on the Internet. One of the most frequently asked questions of businesses today is "Are you on the Web?"

The excitement of the Web comes from its ability to combine text; pictures and sound within the same document and display it on a computer screen. The Web also makes it possible to link two or more documents together to provide a Web user with a seamless flow of information on a topic or series of related topics. The really neat thing about this is the documents need not be stored on the same computer in order to be linked together. Linked documents can be stored on computers that are anywhere in the world.

Surfing on the Web

In order to start using the world Wide Web, you need a piece of software called a web browser. Among other things, browsers assemble the various parts of a web page and display them on the computer screen as a coherent whole. They provide you with point and click access to the various parts of a Web page.

A real life example

Recently, someone on the ACOLUG mailing list asked if anybody knew anything about Canine Companions, an organization that trains and pairs service dogs with people with disabilities. I happen to know a bit about this organization since their national headquarters is near where I live, but I didn’t have any specific information at hand that I could share. I suspected Canine Companions might have a web page. I opened my web browser and went to work. My first stop was at a web site called Yahoo.³ This is an excellent search service for the Web. I typed the words "canine companion" in the Yahoo search field and pushed the return key on my computer. Soon I was presented with a list of possible sites. At the top was the Canine Companion web page. I put my cursor on the highlighted name and clicked; this took me straight to the correct page. It had all the information I could want on the organization. I saved the relevant text on my computer’s hard disk. I put this information into an e-mail message and sent it to the person on the ACOLUG mailing list who asked the question. He was delighted, and I was pleased I could be of service. The really neat thing about this was that the entire transaction, from search to sending off the information, only took about ten minutes.

I was discussing the impact the Net has had on people with disabilities with the mother of a child with cerebral palsy. She told me," I was looking for a community for my daughter and I think we found it on the Internet. She had no autonomy before she got on the Net–mobility stopped her from making friends---now she has emotional, if not physical, autonomy."⁴

There is no doubt that the Internet holds great potential for persons with disabilities, especially augmented communicators. We can be ourselves on the Net, unfettered by the way we look or the way sound.

I hope many of you will get to experience the power of going on-line.

This article appears in AS Volume 2, # 3.

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