One of the first questions Don Danbrook faced after doctors took the tubes out of his nose that had helped him breathe on a respirator for a week was, “Do you know how to use a computer?”
He didn’t.
Not surprising since the year was 1984, and hard-working, hard-partying welders like Danbrook didn’t have much to do with that kind of technology in those days.
His learning curve would be steep.
A few months before his 25th birthday, he had fallen off a porch and onto his head, crushing vertebrae and damaging his spinal cord.
He’d been airlifted to Shaughnessy Hospital, survived a couple cardiac arrests and spent a week outfitted with a cuffed tracheostomy tube that allowed him to breathe with a respirator but prevented him from speaking.
For a month, he shared a room with a 21-year-old University of Victoria student and basketball star named Neil Squire.
Little did Danbrook know what a central role that name would play in his new life as a quadriplegic.
Squire had become a brain-stem tetraplegic, unable to move his legs or arms and unable to speak, after a car crash in 1980.
His second cousin – inventor and engineer Bill Cameron – would soon find a way to help him communicate using a mouth-controlled tube and an old teleprinter.
That work would grow into the Neil Squire Society, an organization dedicated to using technology and knowledge to empower Canadians with physical disabilities.
The society celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
For Danbrook, the organization has been a vital support for three decades.
“They’ve made a huge difference,” he said.
Now 55 and a certified general accountant who works in real estate, Danbrook is just wrapping up a one-year contract at Penny and Keenleyside Appraisals, a job he got through Neil Squire’s Working Together program, which offers wage subsidies to employers who hire people with disabilities.
Neil Squire staff helped him set up his office, including an array of adaptive technology, ranging from a mouth-controlled joystick that acts as a computer mouse, to voice activation software, to a rubber-tipped stick he holds in his mouth to poke the numbers on the office phone.
Thirty years ago, that stick was about all the adaptive technology he had.
“At first they had me poking around on a typewriter learning how to type,” Danbrook said.
“I went from a fairly physical job to not being able to do much physically. It was certainly a shock. I didn’t really know what I was going to be able to do.”
Turns out he was able to do an awful lot thanks in large part to technologies and training he got from the Neil Squire Society.
He credits the organization’s “breath switch” for getting him through his CGA program.
The technology – developed for Squire himself – allows users to command a computer with Morse code generated by sips and puffs on a specialized tube or straw.
At his peak, Danbrook could type 32 words a minute with it.
For him, it meant independence, not having to arrange for someone to scribe for him when he was doing assignments for school.
“It made all the difference, just being independent and using a computer,” he said.
But, in a pattern that has repeated itself for Danbrook and the Neil Squire Society for three decades, the pace of technology soon outstripped their retrofit solution.
The breath switch was built around a DOS operating system, so when most computers moved to Windows’ graphics-based interface, users with limited manual dexterity like Danbrook lost accessibility.
“People needed to be able to move a mouse around,” said Neil Squire executive director Gary Birch, who was then the society’s head of research and development. “It set us back. It set everyone back hugely.”
Soon, though, Birch’s team developed the Jouse, a mouth-driven joystick with a hollow tube that allowed users to click and drag with sips and puffs.
Again, the innovation made computers accessible for users like Danbrook, who still uses a Jouse2 today.
But the shift in technology set him back as well.
Instead of typing 32 words per minute, the best he could do with a Jouse was to hunt and peck on an onscreen keyboard, painstakingly moving the cursor to a new letter for every keystroke, straining his jaw and neck.
“When I started typing with the on-screen key board, it got so I couldn’t chew with the left side of my mouth anymore,” he said.
The advent of affordable voice activation software has since taken some of the pressure off, and Neil Squire technicians have come in handy there too, helping Danbrook through some recent frustrations with an uncooperative microphone.
The next big challenge facing Danbrook and the Neil Squire Society is the shift to mobile technology.
People like Danbrook are once again in danger of being left behind, as the rest of the world relies more and more on smart phones and tablets to bank, shop and communicate.
“I can’t use it myself,” Danbrook said of his iPhone. “I have to get somebody else. I can’t turn it on, to start with. I can’t do anything.”
The advent of the ubiquitous smartphone has been a tipping point of sorts for the Neil Squire Society, which doesn’t have the resources to keep up with the now lightning-fast pace of technological change.
“The resources involved in doing that are so huge,” Birch said. “Wherever possible, you want to leverage or use the solutions that are already out there in the mainstream.”
Ideally, Birch said, the future would see Neil Squire work with government and industry as a service provider, ensuring all new products are accessible “out of the box” for people like Danbrook.
“It doesn’t need to be rocket science to ensure that people with disabilities’ needs are being met as they design new services and products,” Birch said.
Government regulations that force industry to make products accessible aren’t his first choice, but market forces alone won’t create the necessary change, he said, because the demographic buying accessible devices is still relatively small despite an aging population.
“I’d like to be working with industry on this one,” Birch said, “and I think industry will come around eventually, but sometimes you need both the carrot and the stick.”
Neil Squire has already helped push the needle toward more government regulation, playing a significant role in 2008 accessibility hearings that led to a CRTC ruling requiring all providers have to carry at least one cellphone fully accessible to users with severe mobility impairments, like Danbrook.
It’s a start, according to Birch, but there’s still a lot more work for his organization to do.
“The ruling exists,” he said. “The enforcement doesn’t exist.”
