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Our Main Webmaster: Steve Harper
March 14, 2010 »
Introducing our main webmaster: Steve Harper
We hired Steve not only for his web skills, but also for his experience in Assistive Technology.
Steve was born with cerebral palsy, the result of a birth accident, which left him nonverbal and needing a wheelchair.
During his younger years, his speech therapist made a communication board for him. Steve used his right hand with a pointer to spell out simple words. Steve barely had enough control with his right hand to do that, but soon became frustrated with that system. It was simply too slow, and Steve had to work too hard just to spell a few simple words. Steve nearly gave up communicating all together.
Fortunately, when Steve was eleven, his speech therapist found out that the University of Washington had a grant to use Morse code for communication. Under the grant, four disabled nonverbal children would be taught Morse code. Once they had learned Morse code, the children would get a Morse code based communicator for communication. It provided both text and speech output. Steve was one of the four accepted in that program.
Instead of using his barely usable right hand, the U.W. figured out where Steve had the most control with his body to communicate -- his head and neck. Steve uses head switches to do the Morse code.
With his Morse code communication system, Steve was able to graduate from high school and college. In fact at his college graduation Steve was one of two student speakers. Steve wrote his speech with Morse code and Steve gave his speech by using a Macintosh's speech synthesizer.
Steve Harper's commencement speech (12:14) “Please click on your web browser's back button after you're finished with the video to return to this page.”
A local Seattle station did a news clip on Steve's college graduation (2:29) “Please click on your web browser's back button after you're finished with the video to return to this page.”
In 2004 Steve contacted us wondering where the Morse code for the Mac OSX was. Over the years we'd gotten to know Steve. In fact, we invited Steve to go with us on our 2007 training cruise to Mexico. On the cruise, Steve gave a speech about his Assistive Technology and also demonstrated the use of his Morse code system live to our clientele. Steve did this by using his MacBook Pro and Madentec's IntelliSwitch for his Morse code hardware to answer our clientele's questions.
Unfortunately we don't have a video of Steve's speech but we do have lots of pictures of that cruise. Steve's 2007 Mexican Cruise Pictures. “Please click on your web browser's back button after you're finished with the pictures to return to this page.”
In April of 2008 we hired Steve to be our main webmaster at Madentec. Steve is not only our main webmaster but a client and friend.
E-mail our main webmaster: steveh@madentec.com