Daniel’s Issues
For those of you who don’t know, our son Daniel has developmental and physical disabilities. He was born very early and under stress. Before birth, he developed a blood supply problem in his left arm that resulted in the loss of the fingers and thumb on his left hand. If that wasn’t enough for him to deal with, he was later diagnosed with both autism and cerebral palsy. Autism and cerebral palsy are not actual “diseases” for which you can test or take a pill. Rather, they are labels the medical community attaches to behaviors and physical characteristics. In Daniel’s case, he is very easily distracted. He has trouble making eye contact. He is easily upset by certain sounds. He recites long passages from movies and computer games (video talking). All are behaviors associated with autism.
The cerebral palsy diagnosis stems from his lack of gross and fine motor skills. He is hypertonic (has tight muscles and joints), and he falls easily. He can’t run. He can’t rotate his forearm to unscrew a lid. Somewhere between his brain and his muscles, signals are getting crossed or misinterpreted.
To add insult to injury, Daniel has pronation of the ankles; he wears braces to help keep his ankles from collapsing inward. Life has dealt Daniel some zingers.
Discovering the Computer
Learning has always been a challenge for Daniel, but early on, he was fascinated with the computer, even as he largely ignored most age-appropriate toys. When he was four, the school system provided us with some very simple games and learning programs specifically tailored to kids with special needs. We were also provided with a mouse substitute that consisted of a big yellow button. The programs he was using required only clicking — no cursor movement or scrolling.
While he seemed to enjoy the simple programs, it became clear that he could do more. I decided to set up our old Macintosh as a dedicated machine for Daniel. In addition to the programs he was already using, I loaded a few commercial preschool-level games. I put aside the big yellow button and plugged in the standard one-button Apple mouse. It wasn’t long before he mastered moving the cursor around the screen. I wanted the user experience to be as easy as possible for him; I didn’t want him to have to fish through hierarchical menus or nested windows. To launch a program, he simply clicked on the appropriate icon in a small window that sat in the bottom left corner of the screen. The fact that the Apple mouse had only one button made clicking error proof. Even though all of the programs were CD-ROM-based, I managed to get most of them to load onto and play from the hard drive. Inserting CD-ROMs was not something Daniel could do at this point, so he still needed our help loading discs for the few programs that refused to play from the hard drive.
