Assistive Technology Update
Seminars@Hadley
Assistive Technology Update
Presented by
Wade Wingler
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
April 13, 2016
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Assistive Technology Update. Our presenter today is Wade Wingler. Wade is the Vice President of Technology and Information Services and Security Officer at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indianapolis. He is responsible for the agency’s information technology program and assistive technology service lines. Wade has more educational background and certifications than I have time to talk about today, but just to let you know that he is extremely qualified on this particular topic, and the reason that he’s here today, he is also the host of a popular internet radio program on podcast, Assistive Technology Update, which was listed number 1 in its class by about.com. Today, Wade’s gonna share some behind the scenes insight on what it takes to put that program together and also discuss some of the more engaging interviews he has conducted. So, let me now welcome my fellow Hoosier, Wade Wingler, and we’ll get under way. Welcome Wade.
Wade Wingler
All right everybody, this is Wade Wingler and I am so excited to have you guys here today for the seminar here at Hadley. Let me get started here in talking a little bit about our program. We’re gonna talk about assistive technology update today. I thought I would start a little bit by talking about my background and how I ended up doing what I’m doing on the podcast, talk a little bit about our organization and what we do, and then do some Q & A with folks about the show, and probably talk about some of the more interesting guests that we’ve had over the years.
I will start by talking a little bit about me. Again, my name is Wade Wingler and I am a born and bred Hoosier. I’ve been in the state of Indiana for 45 years I guess it will be this year. In terms of my professional background, I have been working for Easter Seals Crossroads here in Indianapolis for about 22 of those years. I became interested in assistive technology kind of in an interesting way. I was one of those kids who got a RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer 2 back in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, and if there are any fellow geeks in the room, you might remember back about those old RadioShack computers that ran on DOS.
I started off as an in my bedroom computer programmer kind of guy and then went to Butler University here in Indianapolis and studied sociology, social work, those kind of thing, and started right after college as an assistive technology trainer at Easter Seals Crossroads. I was sort of a blend of computer programmer/social worker and saw an ad in the paper that basically said work with people who are blind or visually impaired teaching them how to develop computer skills, and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun.
So I have been here at our organization for about 22 years. Started off as a trainer, ended up managing our assistive technology program, and then in 2007 we were awarded the INDATA project, which is the federally funded Assistive Technology Act grant for the state of Indiana. Every state and territory in the U.S. has some funding to do this kind of a thing. Basically, the programs are charged with doing things like having assistive technology lending libraries, doing a lot of education and outreach related to assistive technology, and just sort of sharing the word about assistive technology throughout the states and helping people get access to information about that kind of stuff.
As part of that, we decided that it would make sense to try to share information with people in as many formats as possible. We still go around and do a lot of educational programs, sort of dog and pony shows; we’ll go to groups and speak to them about assistive technology. And for a while we did a fairly big assistive technology conference here in the state of Indiana. It was a lot of fun, but, sadly, we had some challenges with some of our local funding and we weren’t able to continue that program after a few years. So we were trying to figure out how can we get information to people in Indiana about assistive technology without the expense of renting out a conference center and hiring caterers and all that kind of stuff.
I am somebody who has been listening to podcasts for a long time and really found that they’re a good way to get information on very specific kind of topics. Combined with the idea that I liked podcasts and I wanted to be a disc jockey when I was a kid, I always thought that would be a fun career, I decided that we were gonna do a weekly news program related to assistive technology. Let’s see, we’re on episode about 257 now, so 256 weeks ago we decided to create Assistive Technology Update, which was sort of our flagship assistive technology podcast. The goal was to share information with people in Indiana about assistive technology, and, as I was looking at the information that came across my desk as an assistive technology person, I realized there really is a lot of great information between the Listservs and the blogs and even vendors of assistive technology who are constantly showcasing products and making sure that we were aware of them. There is a lot of good information to share.
We started with a single episode of Assistive Technology Update. It ran about 3 minutes or so, and it was – I should play it – very high energy, a lot of upbeat music, and somebody who had never really been behind a microphone before talking very fast and in a big disc jockey voice about assistive technology news. So that first episode included three or four news items and the promise that we would come back and do that on a weekly basis. That actually went very well. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to set up the technical aspects of a podcast, how to record it, how to edit it, how to set up the RSS feeds, and all the technical kind of things that you need to do to get your podcast up in the iTunes store and out on the web and places like that.
We ran it for a few weeks before we decided that we needed to do more than just reading the news stories. We needed to do something a little more engaging. At the time, we decided we would start with an interview. We did our very first interview with an expert on assistive technology at that point, and our format sort of shifted. The very first show, or few shows, were just 3 or 4 or 5 minutes long and included just reading the news, and then we shifted into adding interviews. We’ve grown the show into the format that it’s in now, and here’s what Assistive Technology Update is.
Every Friday, just after midnight on Eastern Time, the show comes out. It hits iTunes and our website, which is eastersealstech.com, and all the other pod broadcasting sort of platforms, just a little after midnight between Thursday and Friday. The show runs about a half an hour. In fact, it’s edited down to 27 minutes because it’s carried on several of the alternative broadcast radio reading services around the world, or around the U.S. So, it’s a half an hour news program.
The first half of the show, 12-15 minutes or so, involves news stories, and it sort of hearkens back to our original format where we just pick things that come across the interwebs, the blogs and news stories and e-newsletters, and things like that, to talk about the new versions of programs that are coming out, what new versions of screen readers or magnifiers are coming out, talk about research that we find out about. We did a story last week about a glucose sensing wrist band. The idea behind this technology, it can sense what a person’s blood glucose is doing and then this prototype model can actually distribute metformin for the individual who has diabetes. This a prototype device coming out of Korea and the idea is that it can measure your blood sugar and give you a dose of metformin to help with that. So, those kinds of news stories. We’re talking about new hardware and software, new research, and some of those things that are coming out. That’s the first 12-15 minutes of the show.
Then the middle part of the show, we usually have a guest segment call-in. We either have somebody from AppleVis call in and do an app review or somebody from BridgingApps, which is an app group out of Houston, Texas, our Easter Seals in Houston, and talk about an app that’s interesting. Then once a month, we have an advocacy director from ATAP, which is the Association of Assistive Technology Act Projects, call in and tell us what’s happening in the federal government in the world of assistive technology and funding related to that. So the first half of the show is the news, the middle part of the show is an app review. And then the last half of the show, the last 12-15 minutes, is an interview with a thought leader in the field of assistive technology, and we’re gonna share some of those conversations here in a little bit. I’m gonna recap some of those interviews and talk about that kind of stuff.
It’s grown from that original 3-5 minute format or so of just news into something that’s grown geographically. We started off just in Indiana, now we can track listeners in about 152 countries or so. The content has grown. We do more than just a few news stories; we also include some pretty interesting interviews with thought leaders in the field of assistive technology. And we were very happy when about.com not long ago recognized us as the number 1 show in our class when it comes to podcasts related to assistive technology. That was kind of a nice acknowledgement of the work that we’ve been doing.
The interesting thing about the show is we have to constantly scan the horizon of assistive technology. We have to figure out what’s happening in the world and capture that information. Some of the ways that we’ve done that is we’ve tried to develop a culture here among our staff where everybody’s constantly on the lookout for what’s happening with assistive technology. We’ve got a pretty big assistive technology staff here. We’ve got about 15 people who are full-time assistive technology trainers and technicians and people who are managing our lending library of devices and all that kind of stuff. We’ve got a pact here that when somebody sees something cool or interesting, that gets emailed over to me and I’ve got a system that I use to curate ideas and content for the show. In fact, I use Evernote as the program that I use to do that.
We also are subscribed, I think, to about every kind of assistive technology Listserv and newsletter, as well as RSS feeds related to assistive technology out there. So we spend a lot of time scanning and curating content that’s out there. And then we also have some Google alerts set up based on key words to help us figure out what’s coming across the web, what’s coming across the news services related to assistive technology so that, when we sit down to record – we usually record on Wednesday mornings or Wednesday afternoons depending on the week – we can comb through usually dozens, if not even 100, different items of news about assistive technology that came up that week. And then we can use that list to make some educated guesses about what’s gonna be popular and what’s gonna play well on the show, and then we sit down and record.
We do have a small recording studio; I’m sitting in it right now. It’s a system that’s got a soundboard and several Macintosh computers set up. We’ve got one set up for guest interviews so that we can do Skype or GoToMeeting kind of connections. We have enough seats in the studio for 4 individuals to sit down and, when I talk about another show that we do, that’ll make sense why we have that. We can have panels happening here in the studio to talk about assistive technology. And then we record. We’re using Mac hardware and Adobe software for our recording, editing, and those kinds of things, and then we edit down the show; record it, edit it down, and then pop it up onto the web so that it’s available for download.
We started with Assistive Technology Update as our primary news show, and it continues to be our flagship show. And then we also have a couple of other shows that I think are interesting. One is called Accessibility Minute. It also comes out every Friday, and it is hosted by Laura Medcalf. Laura Medcalf is a person on our staff who is our social media content specialist, and so her main job in life is to – or at least at work, maybe not in life, but here at work – is to write for our blog. If you’ve ever been to our blog, which is over at eastersealstech.com, and read many of the news stories that come up on a daily basis, Laura is the person who’s creating most of that content. She also does Accessibility Minute, which is about a minute. We’ve recently relaxed the format a little bit so it’s not locked into only 60 seconds; sometimes it’s 01:20 or 01:30 or so. She does a one shot of information about assistive technology, so she’ll talk about an app, or some sort of a program, or some sort of a service related to assistive technology. But it’s designed for people who aren’t ready to commit to an entire half hour of news on a weekly basis, or somebody who just wants a little bit of information. Sort of like a grammar girl style of podcast or one of those little one minute long shows. Accessibility Minute comes out every week and it’s also very popular. You can get that on iTunes or you can get that at our website.