E-SPEAIT Week 14

 

There are many solutions to make computers usable for people with different disabilities or impairments. Some of those are Braille displays and keyboards, speech synthesizer and screen reader.

Rocky Stoutenburgh had an accident at the age of 19 where he fell and landed the wrong way. He dislocated two of his thoracic vertebrae and severed his spinal cord. He was diagnosed with quadriplegia. This left him paralyzed from the neck down. He has had some improvements but he still can hardly roll his shoulders. Before the accident Rocky really enjoyed gaming and couldn’t play from some years. His disability didn’t stop him from continuing. He said that at that time there weren’t a lot of great options for disabled gamers. His brother showed him a gaming controller designed for quadriplegics and they decided to try it. The first model wasn’t very great, it kept falling apart. Five years later a new model of this device was released and Rocky started to test it out. The controller is a mouth-operated device named QuadStick. Rocky explained the device: “There’s three holes on it that you can sip on or puff into, or you can sip on two holes at the same time, or all three at the same time. There are all kinds of different combinations; you just have to pick what button you want at that particular time. And then there’s a button underneath that you can press with your lips.” Rocky uses the QuadStick FPS model, it has a joystick, four sip/puff pressure sensors and a lip position sensor which can be assigned to output to any game controller button or axis, or to any mouse movement, button or keyboard key. All that can be changed quickly while playing the game. Other models of the device offer different variations of sensors and joysticks. Thanks to this device Rocky can enjoy games even now.  He also streams his gameplay on Twitch.

Rocky's Twitch link: https://www.twitch.tv/rockynohands

Link to QuadStick webpage: https://www.quadstick.com/




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