Why are we all so surprised when a dying person dies? My grandfather was 99 when he passed on, and I was shocked. Perhaps it's a good thing--the death of a person who has touched many lives binds people in a way that they are not willing to make public in the regular course of events.
I'm listening to that famous Standford commencement address. Nuff said.
I've been thinking about Apple and assistive technology. I remember using the Apple 2e with my adult special needs students in the 90s. Many of them had fine motor difficulties, but they managed those computers no problem. They could insert the disk and hit the space bar, and up would pop Paint with Words or Moneyworks or Clockworks or some other marvelous program that looked primitive by today's standards but could be operated with not much more than a space bar, plus it taught them how to read, count money and tell time. Our biggest obstacle were the constant reminders: "Don't touch the mylar!" Luckily, we had multiple copies of all our disks.
I was actually disappointed when my outdated computers were replaced with new-fangled IBMs with mice and safely inaccessible mylar. Now I had to boot up the computer for most of my students, change programs for them and daily reconfigure Control Panel in order to circumvent the mouse. At that point, I was not a fan of the mouse.
When I later worked with children, I could see how the mouse was more intuitive for people with low literacy skills. And now I know that Apple was on the "job." Steve Jobs, and visionaries like him, continued to create channels of access for people who were alternatively included and excluded by new technologies. In the long run, our Steve was a good guy for universal access. Seriously, if Stevie Wonder thinks so, it must be true.
Some other tributes to Steve Jobs and his commitment to accessibility:
From Beth Finke at Easter Seals, a blind user of the iPhone.
From Tim Carmondy at Wired, who's son is on the autism spectrum.
I strayed away from Apple for years, but I'm glad to be fully back into the fold. It all restarted three years ago, when my principal bought an iPod for my music classroom. My own iPod, iPhone and MacBook Pro inevitably followed. As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots backwards.
