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As alumni of NIU, both Dawn
and I send our heartfelt thoughts and sympathies to the students, faculty
and staff at Northern Illinois University.
Blind ambition
Friday, March 24, 2006
AMY MCFALL PRINCE Columbian staff writer
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Out of a
small Vancouver office, Michael Hooks, 35, runs a regional
business that connects the blind and visually impaired with
technology that helps them pursue jobs once considered out of
their grasp. Hooks, who is legally blind, recently wrote a
computer program that made it possible for a blind Portland
medical student to use a popular diagnostic tool so she could be
competitive with her peers. (Janet L. Mathews/The Columbian)
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Michael Hooks knows you can't teach ambition. And since he's passionate about
helping people who have it, the former teacher made a career shift to put them
in his path.
He helps people reach their goals of becoming doctors, writers, and Web
designers, to name a few. The difference is he works with people who are legally
blind, and so is he.
About six months ago Hooks left his teaching career to open Next Level Assistive
Technology, which helps people locate technology to overcome boundaries created
by their impaired vision or develops it for them.
Vancouver is home to the Washington State School for the Blind, and as such, has
become a magnet for services to help the visually impaired. Still, Hooks stands
out.
His clients say it's his ability to teach and inspire that has made the real
difference in their lives. He understands what it takes to succeed despite a
disability.
"Society usually expects less of people who are blind or visually impaired.
You're going to have to work harder and get past that," he says.
Hooks, 35, was born with juvenile retinoschisis, a disease that causes eyesight
to worsen throughout childhood. His central vision is affected, so he can see
only at very close range. It's possible his vision could deteriorate more.
Knowing his vision would steadily decline, Hooks set high standards for himself
and was determined to learn how to use Braille as well as technology that could
help him overcome his poor vision.
The journey led him to Northern Illinois University where he earned a master's
degree in assistive technology for the visually impaired. It was there that he
first came up with the idea for his business.
But his initial career path took him in another direction. He spent seven years
teaching social studies and technology at the Washington State School for the
Blind.
As a teacher, Hooks didn't allow students to accept defeat.
"He made me cry," said former student Renae Goettel, who is now a student at
Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. "I thought I was trying as hard as I
could. Being a teenager, you want people to feel sorry for you because you're
blind, and he didn't buy that."
Ultimately it was Hooks' experience with students like Goettel that eventually
convinced him that his first instincts about his career were right.
"I wanted to do more," he says.
Hooks said he knew opening an assistive technology business would connect him
daily with bright, ambitious students as well as career-minded adults. "This way
I get to touch more people," he says.
Nevertheless, the job change forced him to once again shoot high and take a
risk.
By focusing on the blind, his potential client list would be only a small
percentage of the population. Meanwhile, his wife's working career was on hold.
She took a hiatus from teaching to spend more time with their daughter.
Determined to make the business work, Hooks dialed up contacts at state agencies
throughout the West to increase his chances of receiving referrals. He also
decided to focus the business on people who have low vision. That expanded his
potential client base to aging adults. He's betting that helping people read
newspapers, pill bottle labels and computer screens will sustain him.
So far the formula is working. One of his first big breaks came in the form of a
pioneering medical student.
Shortly after he opened his business, the Oregon Commission for the Blind asked
him to create software that would enable a blind naturopathic medical student to
look up diagnostic information on a device similar to a PDA.
Hooks then showed 41-year-old Chris Cooke how to use it. "It levels the playing
field for me," she says. "I have the same information as my sighted peers."
Even though Hooks' victories come one by one, they're just as satisfying to him.
Chances are he'll never work with another blind doctor again.
"What I'm trying to do is say, 'You're blind, you have the intellect, the
desire, why are employers not hiring you?'" he says.
"I have clients who want to work so badly, they just don't have the right
tools."
Sunrise Fletcher, 58, didn't know tools existed that could help him regain past
independence. He has long been legally blind, but in the past few years his
degenerative condition worsened to the point that he had to stop using a
computer.
Hooks taught the Skamokawa man how to build and maintain Web pages for the bed
and breakfast Fletcher and his wife operate.
Over the past few weeks, Hooks has visited Fletcher's rural home several times
to install software and train him.
"Michael is such a good teacher," Fletcher says. "He really knows his job, so he
knows when to stop, when is too much."
Hooks says he learned those skills in the classroom.
"I don't think I would be as good at this if I wasn't at the school working with
blind students every day," Hooks says. "Just because you're blind doesn't make
you an expert. You have to understand people and understand what they're going
through before you can teach them."
In some cases former students are now potential clients.
He helped Goettel, now 21, line up technical training in Texas, where she's
attending school. With the skills she learned, she's started work as a sports
reporter for her college newspaper and landed a public relations internship with
the San Antonio Spurs' NBA team.
While she knows Hooks' business will be helpful to her future, she says he's
already given her the best assistance by providing an example.
"It's great to see someone who has a visual impairment be successful. He made it
through college; he made it through grad school, and in his personal life, he's
been successful, too," Goettel says. "I can see how my disability will be an
obstacle, and I can see a way to get around it."
Amy McFall Prince can be reached at amy.prince@columbian.com or 360-759-8019.
One of the First
Blind Doctors in her Field
PAC Mate Enables Blind
Medical Student to Achieve her Ultimate Goal
PORTLAND, OREGON -
In a few months, the newest doctor – and one of the first doctors of her kind in
the nation – will hang her shingle in the Portland, Oregon area. Chris L. Cooke
will become one of the first totally blind doctors in the US with a specialty in
naturopathic medicine.
The new Dr. Cooke, blind
since birth, will carry the usual medical instruments in her black bag,
including a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, and a Pocket PC crammed with
medical references – a tool most modern doctors rely on to help with diagnosis,
prescribing the right medicine, and ordering and interpreting lab work. The
difference is her tools of the trade will talk. In fact, in large part, she
credits her ability to be a good doctor to a
PAC Mate™ accessible Pocket PC for the blind and two Oregon men who made
medical reference software accessible to the visually impaired, using the PAC
Mate.
The PAC Mate is the first
and only accessible Pocket PC that is founded on mainstream technology. As such,
it does more than talk; it can run many programs developed for off-the-shelf
Pocket PCs – including medical software. The PAC Mate also incorporates
JAWS for Windows®, leading screen reading software that can easily be
adapted with scripts to make those programs accessible for blind users.
Cooke, who at 40 is
completing her last months’ studies at the National College of Naturopathic
Medicine in Portland, chose naturopathy as her specialty because, “Naturopathy
combines the prescription of (standard manufactured) drugs with natural remedies
and emphasizes general diagnosis, the use of natural therapeutics and
traditional medicine, and we work with diet, nutrition, life style, and
botanical medicine,” she said. “Ultimately, naturopathy is about treating the
whole body and finding the cause of disease and not just symptoms.”
Naturopathic specialists
are licensed in 15 states and all Canadian provinces. “We study the first two
years the same as any MD studies - pharmacology and all the basic sciences,” she
said. “In the last two years, we do thousands of hours of clinical work, and
study nutrition, natural therapeutics, homeopathy, and botanical medicine.
That’s where it is important to have (portable) access to medical research and
current information. Medical knowledge changes weekly. It wouldn’t be practical
to scan all this information and print it. It would be too unwieldy to have to
look through all those printed resources and keep them updated, even with
sighted assistance.”
“In my third year of
medical studies last year, I realized that all the comprehensive medical
reference software out there was moving toward PDAs (Personal Digital
Assistants, also called Pocket PCs) or the Internet,” she said. “You don’t
always have an Internet connection, so I decided a PDA would be best for me.”
Cooke was interested in
Epocrates Essentials™, an all-in-one mobile guide to drugs, diseases, and
diagnostics. “I looked into what could possibly run this kind of program for me
(and be accessible). Only the PAC Mate could, so I contacted the Oregon
Commission for the Blind and requested the purchase of a PAC Mate.”
She chose the BX 440 model
which comes with a braille display and Perkins-style keyboard, often used by the
blind in place of the traditional QWERTY typewriter layout keyboard. The PAC
Mate, as with any mainstream Pocket PC or PDA, allows her to take notes, write
and receive e-mail, surf the Web with an Internet connection, use a calendar,
calculator, and other standard PDA functions – all made accessible for the
blind.
“I really enjoy my PAC
Mate,” said Cooke. “I take all my chart notes on it and print them out on a
portable printer that works with it. I like the flexibility of having the
traditional PDA applications running on my PAC Mate.”
She still had one more
obstacle in her way. The professional medical software written for PDAs was not
accessible to the blind.
“I knew the PAC Mate would
run the (Epocrates) software, but it would need to be scripted to be accessible
to me.”’ That’s where Michael Hooks, a legally blind former assistive technology
specialist at the Washington State School for the Blind, stepped in. Along with
his associate, Chris Meredith who is totally blind, Hooks owns and operates
Next Level
Assistive Technology a Vancouver, Washington-based business that serves the
greater Northwest. The company consults with universities, government agencies
and others on assistive technology and also sells accessible technology
products.
Scripting is the process
of writing a series of statements that tells JAWS how to navigate or what to
read under different conditions. With the blessing of Epocrates, Inc., Hooks and
Meredith began writing a script for the PAC Mate that would make the software
accessible.
“I’ve been writing scripts
for JAWS since 1996, basically since its inception,” Hooks said. “I have a lot
of experience, but this was the first time I had written a script for the PAC
Mate. A week or so later, Chris (Meredith) and I had it scripted, ready to go,
and functional. The PAC Mate is truly the most powerful PDA for the blind on the
market today. Most (Pocket PC software) can be installed and will work right out
of the box. Because The PAC Mate uses JAWS, we can easily script programs to be
fully functional. Competing products don’t have that kind of flexibility.”
“I was amazed at how
quickly they had Epocrates scripted for my PAC Mate,” Cooke said. “I also
enjoyed being part of the process, where (Hooks and Meredith) were not familiar
with something medical, I could give them suggestions about how it worked best
with us. It worked out really well.”
Cooke practices 12 hours a
week in her school’s teaching clinics and a community clinic. With Epocrates
made accessible, “Now I have access at my fingertips to diagnosis tools, signs
and symptoms of diseases, and causes and treatments. I also have a lab tool. If
I want to order a lab, I know how much it’s going to cost. I can interpret the
lab work. Within one tool, I also have an infectious disease component, so,
let’s say, if someone comes in with strep throat, I can look it up and see what
drugs are usually used to treat it.” She also is using Pocket Excel on the PAC
Mate to set up a 450-item spreadsheet of medicinal product ingredients, prices,
and pertinent information she needs when seeing patients.
Hooks and Meredith have
gone on to write scripts that make two additional medical reference guides for
Pocket PCs accessible on the PAC Mate. One program is a reference manual for the
chart codes for diseases. The other is a series of internal medicine manuals.
“I definitely get great
benefit from my PAC Mate with all of these programs,” Cooke said. “I can look up
things during my clinic shifts, things that all doctors are expected to look up
like drugs and the interactions they might have and what herbs interact with
prescription drugs. I can also look up side effects of drugs patients are on
now. If I’m diagnosing a potential disease, I have the explanations there of
differential diagnoses, and I can present them for a case. Mostly, it’s just a
great tool to have for all of these things.”
With her accessible tools,
Cooke said, she can practice medicine on a level playing field with her sighted
colleagues. “The only thing I need help with is a student or doctor to assist me
with things, like if a person needs me to look at a rash or needs me to look
into an ear.” In fact, other doctors have asked Chris to use her PAC Mate to
help them rapidly develop treatment plans.
As for her patients’
reaction to her blindness and her unique accessible medical tools, Cooke says,
“Occasionally, a patient is taken aback for a few minutes, but because I talk
and really listen to them, they really enjoy working with me. They are always
fascinated by the PAC Mate and what it is. They are fascinated by the braille
display particularly.”
Chris expects to set up
her practice in Portland, with a second office in nearby Newberg.
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