Change or Die

The State of Assistive Technology From My Desk

1 in 5 small businesses have been reported to be permanently closed (A Small Business Trend Big Business Can’t Afford to Overlook, Nov, 2020) due to forced business shutdowns and government actions taken beyond their control during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our customers (Veterans, people over 60 and individuals with co-morbidities) were told if they left their
homes they were likely to catch the virus and die, so they didn’t.

Our primary sources of funding for customers are the Veterans Administration and state Vocational Rehabilitation Departments, just like the VAST majority of accessible technology providers. While the VA has remained open, very few to no patients have been coming in for assessments. No assessment, no referral. No referral, no purchase order. Most state government offices including Vocational Rehab are either closed or remote. Again, no assessments, no referrals. This is the state of the two largest buyers of assistive technology right now.

Our last partner order was placed on April 10, 2020. The VA and Voc Rehab agencies are their biggest buyers too. I have grave concerns that these mom and pop businesses will not be able to survive further directives to keep our and their customers away from their providers.

Change or Die

The entire Assistive Technology industry is crippled to use a not so veiled pun. Change or die. I CHOOSE CHANGE.

When I started this venture the entire premise was to bring together the skillsets of technology experts I have personally known for decades from different fields to solve real problems affecting real people’s lives with commercial, off the shelf technology to bring the costs down to attainable levels.

Time to get back to our focus and disrupt this industry just like we did when we:

• First low vision/blind provider to use off the shelf, commercial hardware
• First implementation of Microsoft’s Azure OCR on a wearable device
• First implementation of Google Cloud Vision on a wearable device
• First VR app to enable the user to “move” the screen to their “sweet spot” for the best results
• Offered the first 30 day money back guarantee
• First tech provider to research and refer customers to government payment programs

4 of 6 of those bullets are tech. We are a tech company. We are not a logistics, support or sales company. These are all roles we were forced to adopt due to the entrenched business models in place in the assistive tech industry. We need to do what we do well and do it well again. I hope you will join us.