by Mike Rosen | Apr 2, 2014 | Rosen
March 14 to 16, Crowne Plaza, Baton Rouge Louisiana. That was the time and place of the Louisiana NFB Affiliate Convention. I attended as a representative and salesperson for E.A.S.Y. LLC, the Vermont start-up making waves in the world of tactile graphics. This must be the sixth State Convention I’ve attended, and one thing became clear fast; NFBLA has it’s act together. Two hundred and forty people were registered, organization was impeccable, and spirit was high. As an engineer, entrepreneur and sighted human, NFB gatherings are always interesting, but this one was a standout. I shared the exhibit hall with Rick Payton of Southern Assistive Technology. Just two booths seemed a little light, but Rick is a 30-year veteran in access technology and had a lot of product areas covered. The room attracted little traffic on Friday but my concerns were eased when a non-stop stream of people came through on Saturday. And what people they were. I met a couple who had met each other years earlier at the Louisiana Center for the Blind. They were accompanied by their daughter, now at the Center, accompanied by her boyfriend, whom she met at the Center. “Center” indeed. At the booth and at the Banquette I heard for the first time (I am, after all, an outsider) about Convention children who… ahem… whose birth could be directly attributed to the good times enjoyed by their parents at Convention. I met a young blind student, American, who used our inTACT Sketchpad to draw tactile Chinese character and speak for me the phrase they represented; and then switched to writing Greek, verbalizing in...
by Mike Rosen | Mar 25, 2014 | Rosen
Here’s a story that proves that experience can be humiliating, instructive and inspiring at the same time. Quick background: our young company, E.A.S.Y. LLC, has been around long enough that we’ve got a really solid base of experience with our intended customers. After all, no product design engineer worth her or his salt can be successful in the marketplace without an intimate knowledge of the people s/he hopes to serve. In our case, that’s people who are blind or have low vision. We’re in the tactile graphics business, meaning that we design, build and sell the suite of “inTACT” products, which make it possible for people make, edit, save, send and receive raised-line drawings of pretty much anything for pretty much any purpose. Problem is that whenever we think we know what “any purpose” includes, we re- discover the limitations of our own imaginations. And so the story: Setting: Kids’ Camp at the NFB National Convention in 2013. This is one of several events in which E.A.S.Y. has engaged children in making, changing, adding to and exchanging raised line drawings. We’ll be doing it again at the 2014 Convention. Cast: a dozen or so blind and low-vision children, ages six to twelve, to be coached in tactile drawing by us – Mike Coleman, Josh Coffee and me, the founders and brain trust of E.A.S.Y. LLC. These boys and girls are visually impaired for a variety of reasons; some have drawn before and others have not. Plot: We are to occupy these energetic and suitably demanding young Federationists for about an hour and a half with tactile drawing. We have...
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