From a distance, the Mobile Reader looks like an ordinary cell phone. But to a blind person, the device that Michael Hooks holds in his hands is more like a key that unlocks doors.

The owner of Vancouver-based Next Level Assistive Technology holds the reader over a crinkled bill, it flashes, and then speaks: “Five dollars.”

He holds the reader over a page of text, it flashes. “The Mobile Reader product line reads most printed documents, from …” a robotic voice intones, as it reads the promotional material, left to right and top to bottom.

“With this device a blind person can recognize currency or read from a printed page,” Hooks says. “It’s really an incredible technology.”

Mobile Readers are not a new concept. But the cell phone that Hooks holds represents a next step for the technology. It can fit in his pocket, take calls, and then inconspicuously interpret the sighted world. The device, made by a company in Massachussets, sells for $2,495.

Today, Hooks is presenting technology made to assist the blind and those with limited vision — including the Mobile Reader — at the Washington Council of the Blind’s annual conference, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hilton Vancouver Washington.

Opportunity calling

The opportunity represented by this talking phone, and by the other products that Hooks sells, are what inspired him to leave a successful career at the Washington State School for the Blind in 2005.

“The unemployment rate for people who are blind and visually impaired is staggering,” says Hooks, who himself is legally blind. But with the right tools, many people can succeed in the workplace.

“Last year I worked with a nurse in the Hillsboro area,” in Oregon, he said. “She had started to lose her vision, but she was a good nurse and Providence wanted to maintain her services. I was able to find the right tools for her so she could do her job.”

In addition to the emotional payoff, Hooks’ leap of faith into the world of business has paid off financially.

He started Next Level Assistive Technology with a $10,000 initial investment. Next Level’s sales now top $2 million a year, largely because of online sales and sales to agencies and organizations that serve the visually impaired.  In January, Next Level will open another office in Hawaii.

ONline Video: Michael Hooks demonstrates the Mobile Reader:

 

Blind Ambition

Friday, March 24, 2006
AMY MCFALL PRINCE Columbian staff writer

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.