Diana Creer-Berti has cerebral palsy, suffers chronic muscle spasms, can't type, can't talk, and uses a wheelchair to get around. Yet this hasn't stopped her from earning an associate's degree and writing two books.
She owes much of her success to Don Dalton, president of Micro Overþow Corp. of Naperville, Illinois. Dalton is a miracle dealer who helps people such as Creer-Berti use computers to lead more productive lives.
"People with disabilities want to work more than anyone," Dalton says. "Although they might not be able to type 100 words a minute, many can talk it. With today's technology, some disabilities can be effectively erased."
Dalton should know. He's a quadriplegic who started his business a million-dollar-a-year company that specializes in the sale of computer equipment for people with disabilities out of his garage six years ago. Since then, Dalton has worked with hundreds of clients suffering everything from blindness to carpal tunnel syndrome, cerebral palsy to dyslexia, deafness to paralysis. Micro Overþow doesn't invent the technologies it sells instead, it tailors computer packages to suit individual needs.
The potential market for such tailoring is immense. Roughly 20 percent of the US population 43 million Americans has some form of disability. "As medical technology improves, we're keeping more people alive who would have died before," Dalton says. "The size of the disabled population will eventually equal that of the nondisabled perhaps as soon as 2005."
Dalton's business received a boost when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990. The act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of physical disabilities and requires employers to make "reasonable accommodations" to give those with disabilities equal opportunities to work. As a result, the market for assistive technology has exploded.
To help Creer-Berti, Dalton attached a notebook computer to her wheelchair and set up a voice synthesizer, a scanning keyboard, and software that gives the gift of gab to those with speech impairments. Using a set of onscreen keyboard matrices, which Creer-Berti accesses by touch, she can control all the functions of her computer and choose words, phrases, and numbers from a menu. And using the voice synthesizer, she's able to "talk" with others.
"We're not product-driven, we're solutions-driven," says Dalton of his company of eight employees, five of whom have disabilities. "Our clients don't want special favors. They want employers to hire them because they can do the job as well as anyone who doesn't suffer a disability."
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Miracle Dealer
