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You're listening to The Disability Law Lowdown, show number 45.

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Jacquie Brennan: For today's webcast, we have a guest, Andy Winnegar, who is going to talk to you about assistive technology awareness. Andy is the Deputy Director for Program Development and Support in the New Mexico Division of Vocational Rehabilitation and Director of the New Mexico Technology Assistance Program. And he's going to talk about assistive technology awareness and outreach best practices, utilizing his work with Everett Rogers and his diffusion model. Although this model is well-documented, the application for people with disabilities has not been for people with disabilities has not been until now. And Andy's going to talk to you about that. Thanks Andy!

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Andy Winnegar: This is Andy Winnegar. I am calling to represent the American Indians with Disabilities Public Awareness Campaign called AIDPAC. This was a two- year project for the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research that began in the fall of 1991. It was used to establish a model for public awareness on assistive technologies directed at American Indians throughout the country.

Involved in our program from the onset was Dr. Everett Rogers who was with Stanford at the time and he was someone who was identified for me by Kathleen Newroe and Bill Newroe. Bill is an assistive technologist and Kathleen had a disability column for the Santa Fe New Mexican. Both Everett and Kathleen have passed away, Everett in 2004 and Kathy, I think, around 2206.

This documentation of this project using Ev’s diffusion of innovations theory and some of the key components is what we’ll go over today. I’m going to try to stay away from the academic terminology and just talk in common language. Some of the key points in the adoption and diffusion model, as it’s called, are that you provide timely and accurate information about the product or technology and Ev’s research had gone anywhere from early on when he was with the University of Iowa and on to Ohio, it was on agriculture. So, using new agricultural products or new hybrid seed studies and how to distribute that information was something that he had built his theory on. That really was based on, early on, from Bryce Ryan and Neil Gross who worked on hybrid seed distribution in the 1940s and then in the 1950s Everett picked up this model and used what later became the adoption diffusion process to disseminate information on new technologies that people needed.

One of the things that he discovered which is very similar to the independent living process or any of the early civil rights ideas is that you need to use local information sources, peers talking to each other is the best way to disseminate believable information, neighbors and friends are trusted and that’s one of the techniques that’s of course used in this outreach strategy. You also need to seek out those early adopters, those people who will experiment with technology and new ideas the quickest because they can also be models, even though they’re two percent, or very low on the scale as far as who is an early adopter. At the highest, maybe fifteen percent are going to be early adopters, someone who buys the latest Blu Ray technology. Those are the people who are going to be models for the community as far as convincing others that this product might work. Then you need to demonstrate some of the products, you know, widely, so that others can see them, those folks who will be in the majority of the users of the product.

Back to AIDTAC and how this program was designed. We worked with Alaskan Public Radio who at the time was running the National Native News, which was broadcast throughout the country inmost of the states. We worked with the corporations in Alaska to also connect with television for those Alaska natives. Then we worked in New Mexico with a peer model throughout the tribes and pueblos. We hired ten Native American peers to work in their communities to distribute information, put up culturally appropriately posters and provided local peer-run forums to spread the news about assistive technology.

Now this is back in 1991 and just as today, there wasn’t very much on the shelf assistive technologies that people could identify in Radio Shack or in your commercial retail stores, so it was pretty localized to those assistive technologies that you use, perhaps hearing aids or wheelchairs or ramps for homes, but the large majority of assistive technologies were unknown to many of the people who were targeted.

We were testing both which models would work best and where folks got their information. So I’ll go over a little bit about diffusion process. It’s a process where a new idea or product is accepted by the market and then the speed of that process varies depending on who the consumer is. The culture, the economics all that plays an important part in the acceptance of technology. Some of the concepts that Ev had that are important to know are the degree to which assistive technology or the service is perceived to be better than what is currently available is important, the degree to which an assistive technology device or service is perceived to be consistent with existing values, past experiences and needs of the consumer, the degree to which the assistive technology device, service or funding is perceived as difficult to understand, the degree to which the assistive technology device may be experimented with and tried out on a limited basis and the degree to which the assistive technology device or service is perceived to be easy to see the results of the use of it.

To get those concepts across, we’re going to use minority media, of course National Native News, minority television and then peer interactions. Over a two-year period, our sample size was pretty huge. Five hundred thousand people basically were able to view or listen to one of our broadcasts and then we had a national 1-800 number where folks could call back in. The phone calls weren’t extremely huge from the radio announcements, television shows. But we were able to get enough data to look at the results and, of course, provide some rationale for moving forward with many of the things we do in New Mexico and are still going on in Alaska actually, as far as outreach to minorities as well as outreach to individuals with disabilities and even public policy makers trying to get our message across. We’re still using many of the same techniques that we tested with Everett back there in 1991 to 1993.

Some of the interesting things that we learned as far as assistive technology, one of the things about assistive technology is that it’s kind of like government concept and the whole terminology and language is very government-oriented. That government trust wasn’t there with American Indians, they never really trusted the government information on either public health concepts or on the new terminology on assistive technology. That just was not understood.

There was a lot of applied lower tech technology in New Mexico called Navajo technology or Indian technology where practical uses of the environment play a part in functionality. One example is a trench dug out for your pick up truck where you could drive into a lower elevation and then easily transfer into your truck from your wheelchair because of parking your truck in this trench or some of the lower tech technologies were using a stick to drive if you didn’t have hand controls or you’d use the cane for pressing on the gas and pressing on the brake while holding on to the steering wheel with the other hand. Those practical technologies, though they might seem crude or unsafe, they were definitely things people adopted because of the economic conditions and the lack of access to the current technology.

Enticing Everett Rogers to work on our project with us wasn’t hard. He’d actually worked with Los Amigos Rehabilitation Engineering Center in California early on. What he discovered was that although they were developing products for people with disabilities, they weren’t using people with disabilities to test out the products nor were they really providing the products that people with disabilities actually needed.

Even though we’ve come a long way since then with technology development, there’s still the need to look at the demographics and the people who are going to be using the product versus just saying, well, we have some folks with disabilities who are close to our locale, we’re going to utilize this independent living center to test out our product. Well that’s really not good enough as far as getting the full input that you need, going and getting representative samples of various populations who are going to represent that marketplace.

Well, I think that was pretty much what I wanted to go over with that project. Some of the things we can review, I guess, is acceptance is going to be affected by the perception of the difficulty or the complexity of the product. Terminology does matter in describing the product as well as acceptance of the product. Providing written instructions and documentation for product use is certainly something that’s needed but those can be just as complex as the terminology. The government-ese that goes along with a lot of assistive technology of course is still there and is not accepted as readily by minority populations or populations that are not as close to the government. There’s a lot of lack of demonstration for assistive technology. Geographic coverage still is not there. Getting more visibility as far as those products that people can actually benefit from being in retail malls and different places where you can get access where people go is needed. And the continued, of course, looking at what people actually need with assistive technology versus what the researcher or the development lab is capable of producing is something that can definitely be used by those who are interested in developing products. For those of us administering programs, I think getting out into those rural areas and allowing our service delivery to be delivered by people who represent those populations that we’re trying to reach is certainly going to facilitate better acceptance of what we’re trying to obtain or achieve.

Thank you and I look forward to talking to you again.

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Jacquie: That was really great, Andy. Thanks so much for taking part in our podcast today. Tune in next time!

The Disability Law Lowdown is brought to you by the Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers, which are a network of ADA centers that provide training, technical assistance and materials on the ADA and other disability related laws. Funding for the Centers is provided by a grant from NIDRR, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. You can subscribe to the Disability Law Lowdown at our website at disabilitylawlowdown.com or on iTunes.



The Southwest and Rocky Mountain ADA Centers are part of a program of Independent Living Research Utilization at TIRR - Memorial Hermann in Houston, Texas, and is funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. If you have questions about disability law or would like to request materials or training, please call 1-800-949-4232. This podcast is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works 2.5 License. For more information and transcripts, visit www.ada-podcast.com.