Digital Scribbler: Disability & Technology Introduction

Hello all, my name is Russ Ewell, and this is The Digital Scribbler Podcast. In this episode, I will introduce myself and provide a little background for both myself and what this podcast will cover during season one, I will also discuss reasons for doing this podcast and what I wish will come of it.

As a father of two sons with disabilities, I have both a deep and personal connection to disability advocacy. It has been vital to me not just to advocate to create a better and more inclusive world for my sons, but to do what I can to create that world myself. I have used my own specific skill set--particularly my interest in technology--to create a platform to discuss and contend with accessibility, inclusion, and assistive devices. At times I will also invite special guests to the podcast to provide a varying perspective, a conversation, or a new side to something that I don’t have personal experience with.

Read more...

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

[inaudible]

Speaker 2: 0:15

[inaudible]. Hello and welcome.

Speaker 3: 0:17

My name is Russ Russell and this is the digital scribbler podcast. Episode one. In this episode, I will introduce myself and provide a little background both myself and what this podcast will cover during season one as well as reasons for doing this podcast and what I hope will come of it. I'm a father of two sons with disabilities. I have both a deep personal connection to disability advocacy as well as it's just vital to me to advocate for and create a better and more inclusive world for my sons, but also for the many others who have experienced disability, have family with disability, have friends with disability that are too often on the outside. I've used my own specific skillset, particularly my experience as a technologist to create a platform to discuss and contend with accessibility, inclusion, and assistive devices. At times. I will also invite special guest to the podcast to provide a varying perspective, a conversation or a new side to something that I don't have personal experience with. The focal point of this series, or at least for episode one, is to evaluate fear eyes and examine how technology is or can help people with disabilities help them overcome human limits and create a more inclusive society. I've chosen to focus on this because of my specialization in technology, really applied technology and my passion for being a thought leader for innovation, for finding solutions to difficult problems. But additionally, because it is so frequently overlooked that modern technology can have a life changing impact on the quality of life of those with disabilities. Technology can help those disabilities access society on a variety of levels and, and really accessibility should have a purpose. It just isn't enough to just have people have accessibility through technology or to a restaurant. Uh, it's about inclusion. We don't want someone to, uh, be able to get on a wheelchair ramp and get into a restaurant only to be excluded socially. We want them to be able to get on that ramp, get into the restaurant and feel welcomed as part of society, not stared at or not considered an inconvenience or an extra cost for a business owner. For instance, for people with nonverbal autism, it can help them communicate in a variety of manners. For those who are blind, they can employee screen readers to access the Internet and written material that they would not be able to independently access otherwise. The technology we have developed and continue to build today is entirely unprecedented. And with this new opportunities and possibilities are endless. Now here's the dream. The possibilities of course are life changing. They have the potential to provide new levels of independence, clear and more accurate communication and even more for people with disabilities. It is equally as exciting to imagine how vis type this genre of technology will continue to develop in the future and how many more lives can continue to be changed by it. Now, when I'm thinking about technology, I also think about east soccer and and some things involved there that we'll be talking about later. Technology can also be critical in providing those disabilities some sense of normalcy and parts of their lives that they saw often feel inhibited or that are inhibitive, uh, the parts of their lives where they're human limits keep them from having the inclusive experience of life. For instance, every child should be able to participate in a team sport growing up or even an art camp or a music camp. What few people realize, however, is how inaccessible these types of activities are for those with special needs. The type of activities that so many children that don't have these challenges are able to receive joy from confidence from and to feel like they're part of the community on the inside, on the outside. Raising my kids and watching society not have the inclusive opportunities caused me to grow concerned. As a parent, we're always concerned for our kids and whether they have a quality of life, especially a quality of life that includes them in the critical community building experiences that too often are not geared to children like my son's children that have special needs and are often inaccessible or difficult for them to participate in. Even when you attend. I became emotional than passionate in an that emotion and passion fueled innovation. As I thought about how when I was growing up, I didn't play sports and I wasn't very good at sports. I didn't really have any interest in them of significance until I was about 11 years old and I decided to learn how to play basketball, but I was terrible at it, terrible at it. And then there were people like one of my sister's boyfriend's, a guy named Gary Gary Hardeman. Then it were friends in middle school and high school like Scott Baker and Dirk Rosette, Jeff shipment and Tim Wobben, Brian Leek and Brian Scheming. All of these guys were superior athletes who befriended me, who included me, and as a result, by the time I hit high school, I was a varsity basketball player. I figured that if my children were having the problem of inclusion and the problem of being able to have their life enhanced by being able to be with other children that don't have disabilities and the richness that comes from the multivariate experience of diversity, I figured if they were having that problem, there were a lot of other children disabilities that were having the same problem as well. So I set out to fix it. This is how east soccer came to be. East soccer is a program that I founded in 2000, which is an all volunteer includes a soccer program. It aims to empower special needs, children of all abilities to promote community and athletic involvement. A lot of things have come from east soccer. I received a Jefferson award for that. We started ie hoops. The San Jose earthquakes became a part of uh, a partner for us with the soccer and the warriors became a partner for us with the hoops. A young lady named Lauren Marquez went on to win a Jefferson award as well. And you can look that up on the Internet. It's an award for community service that has an impact in a, in a, in a sense of powerful doing good that influences society for the better. Some of the goals of this podcast in addition to speaking about technologies that can provide access to those disabilities is to engage in the conversation involving disability accessibility and guess what Societal Accountability Society needs to be accountable for including every human being, not just the human beings that make our lives easy. When east soccer first began, it was a very small production. It was free. It was a few kids and me and my friends who are parents as well, a handful of US gathering at a small part to learn the game that you soccer. What I didn't expect was that over the next decade, east soccer, which is free, we'd grow to serve hundreds of kids in the bay area and more with its underlying goal of catering to any and all accessibility needs so that every child can play soccer, not just with kids who have special needs and disabilities, but with kids who are typical, who are the, what many people might say are the normal kids. There was a huge outpouring of kids who wanted to participate because so many had difficult, even negative experiences in other programs or hadn't found any that were advertised as being inclusive and accessible. Now here's the, here's the real value. There were just as many typical kids who wanted to be part of the program as special needs kids, typical kids who wanted to help other kids, wanted to teach other kids, wanted to volunteer to be with them. Many of these typical kids went on and continue to be through college and adulthood, friends and best friends who still include these kids from eight years old to almost 30 years old. These kids who've been in these programs have stuck together. That's what inclusion is about, not just the moment of sports but for a lifetime. It was incredible to see the community coming around an inclusive program and even more incredible to see how happy my kids were to have that experience. However, this does not mean my work or our work is even close to being done and that's why I'm doing the podcast. My hope is to infuse, to inspire people to make them passionate and emotional about the opportunities to be able to change the world by making sure that no human being is excluded. There's still a significant lack of accessible and inclusive spaces in the world, places that closed doors on people with varying disabilities. We need to make a breakthrough in those areas. The underlying goal of this podcast is to raise awareness of the ways that we as a society and you personally on an individual level can work to make the world a more inclusive place and what does that, it's a better place. I will primarily discuss this in relevance to the fantastic modern technology that provides the potential to improve the lives of those with disabilities. I will also be discussing the societal factors that are inextricably tied to moving inclusiveness in every corner of our communities, of our cities and our states. Getting into other modes of achieving social change and ways to support and encourage those folks with disabilities in our lives. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for taking the time to tune in to the digital scribbler podcast. Attached to the description of the podcast will be a link to the transcribed pdf so that those who are deaf or hard of hearing can also

Speaker 4: 10:36

access this podcast. I look forward. Yep. So to while discuss ways in which technology could open up the education system for children with disabilities. Again, thank you for listening and I hope you'll join us in training.

Speaker 5: 10:49

Do you know what.