(continued)

Del Vecchio explains: "If you put octagons together in a finite space, you produce more usable space than from squares. The spaces between the octagons are good for storage and circulation. Overall, the space becomes 25 to 30 percent more efficient. Business people appreciate that their rental space is 30 percent more profitable."

Despite his mobility limitations, Del Vecchio has become a successful architect. His clients are the happy beneficiaries of hard-learned lessons about accessibility, efficient use of space, and computer technology. Indeed, his firm has as much work as it can handle with repeat clients and is putting would-be new clients on a waiting list.

Hurdling Language Barriers

Also successful, but having overcome different obstacles, is hearing-impaired architect Robert Nichols. He is principal of the award-winning firm Nichols Design Associates in Washington D.C.

He notes that too many architects believe that accommodating wheelchairs is all there is to providing accessibility. However the simple yet often overlooked installation of teletype-equipped telephones and captioned public address systems can go far to assisting deaf people in public spaces.

Nichols's sensitivity to such issues, and his ability to communicate with hearing-impaired clients has enabled him to carve out a design niche specializing in accessible public accommodation. In recent years his ability to communicate with anyone has been tremendously boosted by the advent of nearly universal electronic mail.

Thanks to adaptive technologies and new efforts to encourage disabled young people to join the design professions, the successes of Nichols and Del Vecchio may soon become more familiar stories.

Starting Out the Hard Way

It was not too long ago, however, that the situation was very different. Washington State University Professor Jeffrey Burnett began in the early 1980s to adapt computer equipment for quadriplegic architects.

He outfitted them with then-state-of-the-art PCs and cobbled together head-mounted pointing devices to control the screen cursor. He programmed some voice-recognition capabilities to operate CAD systems and even experimented with robotic arms to handle floppy disks.

Though effective in returning a few injured architects to practice, Burnett's heroic work was hampered by the available hardware, which was primitive by today's standards.

The first quadriplegic design professional Burnett outfitted was architect John Pekruhn. When working in the office, he had a reflector on the nose bridge of his glasses, which communicated with a head mouse detector on top of his monitor and allowed him to steer the cursor with head movements.

Pekruhn's headset both served as a telephone and transmitted spoken commands to voice-recognition software. On his desk surface would be a book holder with an automated page turner.

"All of this gadgetry," Burnett explains, "allowed him to function for extended periods with only minimal assistance. The result was that the firm got back their trained professional with little additional overhead.

With this gear, Pekruhn could outperform a manual drafter, despite being fully paralyzed below the neck. He has since moved on to start his own architecture and consulting firm.

Recent Adaptive Innovations

Now, Burnett says, several technological improvements have come to the aid of limited-mobility architects. These include more powerful computer processors, higher-capacity yet cheaper mass-storage units, wireless communications bringing electronic mail to the wheelchair-mounted laptop, and more standardized adaptive peripheral devices.

Examples of these peripheral devices are single-handed keyboards, lightweight headset pointers, and trackballs to replace mice. But despite such advances, Burnett says, work still remains to make all these devices work smoothly with the specialized software that architects use.

Such integration requires the work and imagination of experts familiar with the technology, the nature of disabilities, and the requirements of architectural practice.

Empowering the Spoken Word

Key to an architect's skill set is the ability to write. But for those with limited use of their hands, taking notes at a meeting and typing on a computer keyboard can be difficult or impossible.

For them (indeed for any architects who have trouble expressing themselves through typing) there is good news in the field of voice recognition.

Although voice commands have offered a feasible but limited interface to computer software since Burnett's pioneering days, until recently these systems were highly flawed. They often required careful, unnatural speech, with pauses after every word, and their transcription error rate was unacceptably high.

Now speech recognition systems are taking advantage of today's higher computing power, and they can convert naturally spoken speech into nearly error-free word-processed text.

One such system is NaturallySpeaking, from Dragon Systems, Inc. It "takes dictation," and any subsequent editing can also be controlled by voice.

Dragon's new digital recorder can be taken into meetings and used to capture an unlimited amount of speech on removable memory cards. Later, the recorder can be plugged into a PC and automatically transcribed.

Unlike older voice recognition systems, NaturallySpeaking does not require pauses between words. It can be "trained" to recognize idiosyncratic speech, including that of stroke victims or people with speech impediments.

This is only one of the many adaptive devices available through Infogrip Inc., a catalog distributor of a wide variety of adaptive devices.

They also feature HeadMaster, manufactured by the Prentke Romich Company. This is a lightweight, wireless, infrared mouse emulator that can be mounted on a headset or eyeglasses frame. Slight head movements move the cursor around the screen.

Users with no hand mobility can use HeadMaster in conjunction with a sip-puff mouth switch to simulate mouse clicks. These devices can replace the usual manual methods of interacting with computer-aided design systems.

For architects with a small degree of manual dexterity, there is an array of joysticks and trackballs that are simpler to use than mice. These are also enjoyed by the "temporarily-abled" who want to avoid the repetitive motion injuries that may come from prolonged mouse use.

Infogrip also sells Jotto Desks, or mounting devices that can turn a wheelchair into a mobile office. These are, in effect, desk surfaces on which laptops, cell phones, and other equipment can be mounted with industrial-grade Velcro. The wheelchair user can swing the desk to one side when moving in and out of the chair.

Mentoring the Next Generation

With all the adaptive technologies available now, there are fewer remaining physical impediments to disabled people becoming architects. However some cultural hurdles remain. One of these is that there are few visible role models for young people to follow into the profession.

This is about to change thanks to Elaine Ostroff, co-founder of the Adaptive Environments Center in Boston. She is initiating a mentoring program to connect disabled design students and new professionals to practitioners with matching interests.

The mentorship, she believes, will help the younger generation address the physical, attitudinal, and practical roadblocks between them and architectural careers.

Ostroff's program is part of "Access to Design Professions," an international career development program created as a living memorial to pioneering disabilities activist Ron Mace, FAIA.

The program is being funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and by NEC Foundation of America. The mentorship program was jumpstarted at the biannual "Designing for the 21st Century II: An International Conference on Universal Design held in Providence in June, 2000.

There, a group of disabled architects and designers from all over the world met to discuss the importance of, and mechanisms for, mentoring young designers. Once again, technology is rising to the occasion.

Because there are relatively few disabled practicing architects, and they are scattered all over the world, Ostroff is arranging for both the matching and the mentoring meetings to occur on the Internet. A secure on-line directory will help would-be participants match interests and develop working relationships.

Ostroff is also seeking funding for a project to help students identify the level of access at design schools before they apply. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, despite years of improvements in campus accessibility, architecture schools and studio environments remain problematic.

Of Double Significance

As important as it is to promote professional diversity, this concerted effort to get more disabled people into architecture careers will ultimately accomplish more than that.

Behind this effort is the conviction that disabled architects are more sensitive and creative designers of universally designed environments. There is probably no more effective means of becoming sensitized to accessibility issues than to have personal experience confronting environmental barriers.

Indeed, according to Valerie Fletcher, the current executive director of the Adaptive Environments Center, this explains why there is a high level of interest in design among disabled youth.

They also tend to be skilled and experienced problem solvers. The faster they can join the profession and raise the awareness of the rest of us, the sooner the built environment will become universally accessible.

B.J. Novitski is managing editor for ArchitectureWeek and author of Rendering Real and Imagined Buildings.

A version of this article first appeared in Architectural Record, September, 2000.

Several years ago, John Pekruhn regained his ability to practice architecture through support technologies adapted by Jeffrey Burnett. A reflector on his glasses allowed him to steer the screen cursor with head movements, and his telephone/headset transmitted commands to speech-recognition software. Photo: Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities The BAT Personal Keyboard, from InfoGrip, Inc., replaces a full-size computer keyboard and is operated with one hand. Letters and numbers are typed by pressing easy-to-learn combinations of buttons, or "chords." Photo: Infogrip, Inc. The Dragon NaturallyMobile recorder takes dictation and stores the spoken word on removable memory cards. Later, when connected to a PC, the recorder transmits the speech files, and Dragon software converts them to word-processed text. Photo: Dragon Systems The HeadMaster, by the Prentke Romich Company, is a wireless infrared mouse emulator that moves a screen cursor in response to head movements. In conjunction with a sip-puff switch to produce "mouse clicks," it supports hands-off computer operation. Photo: Infogrip, Inc.   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.