Innovation in Technology for People with Disabilities at Pitt

Welcome to Disability Matters with your host Joyce Bender. All comments, views, and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the host, guest, and callers. Now the host of Disability Matters, here's Joyce Bender.

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, to everyone in the United States and to everyone around the world. We have 17 countries with listening audiences from China to South Korea to Australia. And I always say, I don't care if it's one person, one, one of you in a country, you can make a difference. That one person can make a difference. So don't forget about that. Hey, Yoshiko Dart, a special shout out to you, Yoshiko. You know how I love you. And then too, Richard Roberts from the State Department, to Cheryl Harris in Tunisia, Gang Young in South Korea, my friend in Kazakhstan, Veniamin, to all of you everywhere, thank you for fighting the fight for people with disabilities. And speaking of someone that has been fighting the fight, you know, I'm biased because I'm going to tell you how much I love this guest before he's introduced to you, but that is because, you know, he's just a fabulous, brilliant human being that is really, really walks the walk, talks the talk, lives disability himself, and helps people throughout the world. And that would be the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Research for STEM Health Sciences Collaboration at of the University of Pittsburgh, author, and internationally known. Welcome to the show, Rory.

Well, thank you, Joyce Bender. It's a pleasure to be back on your show. I always love to talk with you and spend time with you, and I'm looking forward to talking again today.

Well, uh, and by the way, for everyone, I call Rory, but so you all know it's Dr. Cooper. But anyway, Rory, when I was looking through your accomplishments, oh my goodness, I mean, there are so many. I didn't know what to— I didn't know which thing to talk about. It is so overwhelming how many accomplishments and awards you have. But for our listeners that do not know you, how about if we start with your story? You know, how did you become involved in the disability community? Where did you grow up, and how did you move on into this advocacy role?

That's a great question. I mean, as you know, it's rather— it's easy to join the disability community, but it can be rather painful. And abrupt. I acquired a spinal cord injury and other injuries while I was serving with the US Army in Europe, and I was struck by a truck while I was riding my bicycle while doing physical training, and from then I had to learn to live a new life. Using a wheelchair and other forms of assistive technology. But I was fortunate that my girlfriend at the time, and now my wife of nearly 40 years, Rosemarie, stuck with me, and we built a wonderful life together. I got involved in advocacy at first by accident, mainly because When I was first injured, it was prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the world was not terribly accessible or terribly friendly towards people with disabilities, and it didn't really make sense to me. But I got formally introduced to advocacy by our mutual friend, Judy Heumann. who at the time, to give you a little bit about dating myself, was one of the leaders of the— of CAF, California Association of the Physically Handicapped. And I went to— I got invited by a friend who wanted to go to one of their meetings, and Judy convinced me that not only should I pursue my interest in college and engineering and my interest in sports, but that those of us that have the ability also have the obligation to advocate for the rights and for the inclusion of people with disabilities.

You know, she is just— what can I say? She's the history. She's history. She's an author. The, you know, the movie Crip Camp, so many things. And actually, I have a painting in my office from Time magazine of Judy when she was, you know, in reference to Crip Camp. And it is just amazing how much she has done. She's a great friend, but she has changed the world, no doubt about it. And she's very persuasive. So, I can see what happened there. It would be like you had no choice if Judy's asking you to do something. So, then, Rory, how did you get to the University of Pittsburgh?

So, I got there in a rather circuitous way. So, I, when I was first graduate from college, I was offered a faculty position at California State University in Sacramento, and I was also offered a postdoc by the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center at the Hines VA in Illinois. And I managed to work out a deal to do both. So I worked with Charlie Robinson and John Trimble as my mentors at the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Center in Hines while pursuing a faculty position in biomedical engineering at California State University in Sacramento. And Charlie Robinson moved from Illinois to the University of Pittsburgh and the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System and was the first chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology. And he proposed to the then-Dean Cliff Brubaker and then Senior Vice Chancellor for Health Science at the time, Tom Detre, to recruit me to help with the— help establish the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology and to build a center that was a joint collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the VA. And so, yeah, Charlie convinced actually convinced Rosie and I to, to move from California to Pittsburgh. And it was, it was a rather interesting interview process at the time. I was reading the book The Firm, and it felt a lot— by John Grisham— and it felt a lot like that. Charlie and Dean Brubaker and Dr. Detri and and the chancellor at the time and all kinds of sports medicine. He pulled out all the stops to make people feel like, to make us feel like Pittsburgh would be the place for us to go. So of course we met with the VA leadership in Pittsburgh as well and we were able to work out a deal and from that I came to— Rosie and I came to Pittsburgh and Earl was born, and basically it's been a rapid, rapid, rapid growth ever since then.

Oh, it has. It's so premier, so premier. Where did you grow up then, Roy? Where was your— where did you grow up as a child?

So, this is a little unique bit of trivia, but I was born in East L.A. and I lived there for the first 5 years of my life. And then we moved to Riverside, California, which is in the desert east of Los Angeles. For a little while, and then when I was 10, we moved to San Luis Obispo, California, and I kind of called— I basically call that my hometown. But, uh, and that, uh, I lived there until I was 17, and then at that time I joined the Army as a young enlisted soldier, and Spent a little time training in the United States, but most of my time in the Army was spent in Germany during the Cold War. Right at the— I was at the back end of the Fulda Gap, which if you know the Cold War, that was one of the places that we thought the Russians would come through Europe if they chose to be aggressive. So yeah, and I am a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, a bachelor's and master's degree there, both in engineering. And then I worked for a few years for Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which some of you have probably heard about in the news. And while I was there, my faculty advisors from Cal Poly convinced me that I might be. And I looked for some other jobs, and, and several of the people I was interviewing had recommended that I pursue a PhD given my career interests. And so I, I applied for and was accepted to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I earned my PhD working with Stephen Horvath and Brad Weedle, among other people. It was a good experience. I also, I think today much to my own surprise, certainly at that time to my professor's surprise, I was training for the Paralympic Games. At the same time as pursuing my PhD, and I managed to compete in the Paralympic Games in 1988, earn a bronze medal, represent the United States of America, and in 1989 graduate with my PhD. And then I went to Sacramento and then 5 years later came to Pittsburgh.

Thank goodness for Charlie getting you to move from California to Pittsburgh, let alone Did you know you were going to the best city in the United States? Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I also live and grew up. Well, what a story. And you do have a book, you wrote a book.

I've written several books actually. All of them are textbooks though. I've written, uh, My first book was Rehabilitation Engineering, focused on mobility and manipulation. My goal there was to write the first engineering textbook in rehabilitation engineering. My second book was on wheelchair selection and configuration. And then I've edited several books since then as well. The most recent one was actually reintegration for war-injured soldiers.

Wow, you are— remember what I said when I read your background? Wow, you have done a lot in your young life, and I want everyone to know that Rehab Technology Center that we're talking about is premier. It is premier and is known internationally. Actually, Rory is, because no matter where I am, if I say Rory Cooper, "Oh yes, we know Dr. Cooper." So, what you have accomplished, so much, more importantly, done so much, so much to impact the lives, Rory, of people with disabilities. But at what I love at the work you do, is that at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and with this work you're doing, what is your emphasis on STEM?

So my emphasis on STEM is because first I'm an engineer, and when I— unfortunately, when I look around my field at conferences and— and, you know, professional meetings and things, I just don't see a lot of people like myself or other people with disabilities there. And it's— but I think it's a rewarding career opportunity for people, for everyone, but also especially for people with disabilities. Joyce, as you know, Employment is essential to integration and full participation of people with disabilities. And, but it's still very difficult to find, to attain a living wage, to have a professional career. And we're highly under, people with disabilities are highly underrepresented in STEM. So I think it's a real opportunity, especially the other thing is a lot of people with disabilities are very technically savvy by their own necessity. That's essentially in some ways how I developed my career was trying to invent devices for myself and for my friends. And of course, my network of friends expanded, the type of devices that I started working on expanded as well. But it's even in a lot of the technologies that benefit people with disabilities benefit everyone and mainstream technologies. And so that's— I also think that science and technology and engineering are all better if we have diversity of experiences and thought. Diversity in all of its forms, because the best way to solve a problem is often to look at it from multiple perspectives, which interestingly enough is taught very early on in engineering education, but not necessarily in the thought about diversity from a human perspective. But, uh, I'm sure for those of your listeners who are scientists or engineers, mathematicians and engineers discovered over 100 years ago, 150 years ago, even more, that you could solve a problem in, like for example, the time domain, you could transfer it to the frequency domain and maybe go from calculus to algebra, and it was a much more solvable problem. Problem. I sort of view diversity in the same way, that if you have diverse— if you look at it from a different domain perspective, different life perspective, different experience perspective, then you might come up with better solutions or solutions that are simpler. And so that also encouraged me to explore how we could get more people with disabilities in STEM, and then I discovered that you really have to, you have to really go back to middle school in some ways because that's often where students with disabilities either lose interest in or are discouraged, maybe less discouraged but more encouraged to pursue other areas of study. Or other career paths and lose their— lose touch with the STEM fields. But also, unfortunately, the problem tends to continue at the undergraduate level and graduate level. I was recently just asked to chair the National Academies Committee on how do we make laboratories, field accessories, and computational software more accessible to people with disabilities. Which that's kind of one of the barriers. You can get into STEM fields, but if you can't— if you become a note-taker, observer, or you're asked to just, you know, have a— or not participate in those experiences, you can't get the full perspective and the full education that you might need to be successful. So that, you know, largely that motivated me. You know, partially, to be honest, you learn some of those values early on, and I learned some of those values early when I was in the Boy Scouts and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. And then later in the Army, especially when I went to the Noncommissioned Officers Academy, you learn about selfless service and paying forward, and I saw this as an opportunity where I could contribute beyond my individual engineering and scientific talents.

Wow, that is wonderful. Well, that's just you. That's what I'm talking about when I said that. May I ask now what you're working on? Would that be the curriculum that you'd be doing this with? What would you be doing that with?

So, with the National Academies Committee, we're right now— so I have developed curricula And as you know, there's a lot of diversity within disability itself and a lot of intersectionality. You and I are both examples of that, right? You're a woman and you have a disability, and I'm a veteran and I have a disability. And so that you have to try to keep in, we have to look at that. And then of course there are different learning styles. There are people that are, start out acquired disabilities of adults and the sort of adult learners as they have to update their training or retrain. And so, but the, what we're doing at the National Academies is actually a series of listening tours. Because I don't profess to be the expert on all matters STEM or all matters on inclusion in STEM. And I probably wouldn't trust anybody who claimed to have those abilities. And as you know, the best way to find out how to move forward is to listen to people, those people that have found ways to adapt or found institutions who are willing to make accommodations and find out what those best practices are, and at the same time to find people who are run up against barriers that they've either surmounted or they found insurmountable and find out if there's ways to overcome them or at least earmark them to study in the future and also to gain the experiences of people who are going through the process currently. So, you know, that's the— That's typically how good science is done, right? You, I'll quote Albert Einstein, right? He was once asked, if you had an hour to save the world, what would you do? And he would said, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and 1 minute solving it. And so I think what we have to truly do is sort of define the problem, I use the term barriers and facilitators. What are the barriers, what are the facilitators? And then we can start to look for solutions. Which by the way is a technique that engineering and physicists use all the time and we're taught in school, right? What is known, what is unknown, and what are the assumptions? And so that's the approach we're taking.

Well, that is a— you know what, that applies to so many things. That really does, because I'll go around and I'll talk to executive-level people in the business world, and my question always is, why do you think people don't hire people with disabilities? You know, unfortunately, it seems like everyone says, the same thing, lack of understanding. But I also know there's more involved, but I think that is really great, you know, what you're doing, because how can you know what to do if you don't listen? So that's very exciting. And with that, on the half hour, which you're a couple of minutes early, but that's okay, we have our news break with Perry Jude Radesik, who is the CEO of Disability Rights of PA and just an all-around great human being. Perry, welcome to the show.

Joyce, thank you, and we're excited about the news today.

Well, we're excited to hear you.

So here's what's happening. The National Council on Disability— and I'll tell you about the National Council on Disability in a moment— has announced the date and time of their next quarterly meeting. Now, the council's going to meet this Thursday, October 7th, from 12 noon to 4 PM. Now, the council meeting is gonna take place over Zoom, so any disability advocate can join the Zoom meeting or use the Zoom telephone number and passcode associated with Zoom. So registration, you don't have to register. But the National Council on Disability is asking people to register to come to the meeting. They're gonna provide American Sign Language and CART, so that's already all been arranged for the meeting. So who is the National Council on Disability? Well, it's an independent federal agency that advises federal agencies, Congress, and the president on issues impacting people with disabilities. So you can see how important they really are to people with disabilities in the country. Now, I'll give you an example of, of some work the Council is currently working on. The Council is out there right now seeking proposals on a new notice of funding opportunity for a 2022 progress report on environmental injustice. And by that they mean the impact of the increased frequency of extreme weather events on people with disabilities. So, the council is out there. They're ready to fund someone to go do this work to look at how the frequency of extreme weather is impacting people with disabilities. Very important. If you want a link to that notice of funding opportunity, go to our website at disabilityrightsPA.org. That's dot org. .org, and you can click on today's Advocacy Matters segment and find a link to that notice of funding opportunity. While you're there, you, you may also want to check out the agenda for the council meeting. That's been released, so go to disabilityrightspa.org and go to Advocacy Matters and find the agenda. It's a full agenda, and it includes an update on public policy, voting rights, progress reports on COVID-19, climate change, state advocacy highlights, and so much more. There's even an opportunity for public comment. So the National Council on Disabilities welcomes public comment from anyone— individuals, businesses, providers, educators, parents, and advocates. And they can receive this public comment email. You can email them, or you can request a moment during the Zoom meeting there near the end to provide your public comment. Advocacy matters. Check out the National Council on Disability and their quarterly meeting. Learn more about their national policy activities on Thursday. And be sure you visit disabilityrightsPA.org if you're able to put in a proposal for their notice of funding opportunity.

Thanks, Joyce. Okay. That's disabilityrightsofPA.org. Perry, what— for our listeners, what do they mean by this environmental? What do they mean?

Yes, environmental injustice. So, this is what they mean. We're all experiencing climate change. Even here in Pennsylvania, we've experienced Hurricane Ida, and we still have disaster recovery centers open in places like York Philadelphia, Bucks County. So, it created, you know, having hurricanes come up into places maybe they haven't been before or been with such frequency is due to climate change. And so, they want to study this frequency of these extreme weather events and its impact on people with disabilities. It's another kind of emergency preparedness work. So that's what that's about.

Wow, and it does impact so much. I was reading an article, you know, about how this impacts people with disabilities and people in poverty. So that is environmental injustice. That is really something that we all have to keep on our radar and realize the negative impact of it. So I'm really glad you brought this up. And once again, you can go to your website, Advocacy Matters, and get this link. That's great. Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Perry Jude. We look forward to hearing you next week.

Absolutely.

Take care. Wow, that's a thing, huh, Rory?

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I'm about to think about maybe applying. Pearl's done quite a bit of work related to COVID-19 emergency, in the emergency response, so maybe we can help out.

Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, you'll have to check that out. I'm really glad that she does such a great job every week. She does such a great job. So, Rory, over the years, because boy doesn't time go fast, how have you seen the development of this school of work of health and rehab over the years?

Well, probably the most amazing thing is the growth that I've seen in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and actually its impact across the university for that matter. You know, just to think about the Well, of course, Dick Thornburgh is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. He also passed away this year, another icon in the disability rights movement. And he and Ginny Thornburgh created the Thornburgh Lecture Series that is a partnership with the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, School of Law, the Institute for Politics, and School of Business. Then that's been something that's occurred in that time frame. Our good friend Kate Seelman was the driving force behind that. Later, also, now it's about 3 years old now that Chancellor Gallagher created the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Accessibility and Inclusion of People with Disabilities at the University of Pittsburgh. There are now 3 full-time executive staff dedicated to— in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion— that are dedicated to people with disabilities, which is also pretty remarkable. One for software, one for accommodations for students, and one for accommodations for for faculty and staff, which I'm very proud that I was able to drive that. Also, we, the Office of Veteran Services was created, which was largely driven by the influx of post-9/11 veterans and their family members. So, and the needs to, and that, you know, I was very proud to work with, at that time, the Chief of Staff, Rainey Clark, who was a Vietnam-era Army veteran himself, who helped drive that process, and it's had a remarkable impact on the region. And, you know, our good friend, Ligda Dickerson, who passed away this year, Linda, the school, myself included, worked with Linda in the 1990s to establish the City-County Task Force on People with Disabilities, which continues to affect our region today. So, and then, you know, We've got some really remarkable alumni who've gone on to change the region as well as change the nation. Of course, one of them, you know, you and I both know very well, Jamie Protho, who has gone on to do very well and become pretty influential. Despite his poor taste in football teams.

Yeah, that's the truth. I know every time I describe Jamie, I'll say he really only has one disability. He's a Dallas Cowboys fan. That's his real disability. Yes, we know. Very successful.

Yeah, so that's, uh, what's probably remarkable is, uh, is that I think starting with the school, it's changed, I think changed the university, the culture of the university as a whole, and by extension, I would say amplified the work that was being done in the community because there's been some great leaders like yourself in the disability rights movement for decades, And I can name a number of other people as well. And so I think that— but I think what's nice is that there's a— there's kind of an academic home and partnership for disability advocates in the region and a way to create them for the— nationally and internationally for that matter. For example, one of our alumni is Dr. Jong Bae Kim, who has a spinal cord injury and power wheelchair user who is a professor at Yonsei University in Korea and was on the organizing committee for the Olympics and Paralympics, the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Pyongyang, in Korea a few years ago, and he was a strong advocate to make sure that all of the venues and all of the Olympic villages were accessible. And I had the honor and privilege of going over there and being part of the delegation to the Games and spending time with Jong-bae, and it was just so wonderful to see the impact that he had had on his university, but on the Olympic and the Paralympic movement as well. So it's really, it's wonderful what the impact that the University of Pittsburgh has had regionally, nationally, and globally. And what's really important is doing that in partnership with with yourself and so many other people as well in the advocacy community. As you know, for example, we mentioned G. Human earlier. Kay and I nominated her to be one of the first Thornburg Lecture recipients and give the Thornburg Lecture. And then this year, actually, I nominated Judy, and she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh and spoke at commencement.

Oh, that is so awesome. Well, you know, I love her so much. I really do. Yes, I was very honored to be a speaker also at the Thornburg Lecture Series, and that was truthfully one of my greatest honors. It really was. What a great person we lost. With Dick Thornburg. I mean, just such a great person he is, and with the impact he had even with the ADA, phenomenal. So, Rory, what are you doing right now? Like, what are some of the key projects you want our listeners to know about?

Well, I— well, two things. I recently served on a National Academies report that was just released and is available on the National Academy's website, looking at the feasibility of individuals being able to stay seated in their wheelchair while flying on commercial aircraft. Wow. And as you know, the ability that— it did also the air carrier Transportation Act is having its— I'm not sure which— trying to get an idea what anniversary it is, but it's having a major anniversary this year. Let's see, 35th anniversary of the ACA. And so I think that that report was very timely to come out at that time, you know, to come out just a few weeks ago. It was actually, interesting enough, it was initiated in the Senate by a friend of mine, probably a mutual friend of ours, Tammy Duckworth.

Oh, I love her.

Yes. And so, you know, that— and as you know, the ability to travel on airlines impacts people's ability to access healthcare. To participate in employment and to be active with their families and friends, right? Just, you know, it could be anything from somebody like myself or yourself that needs to travel to participate in professional meetings, but also, you know, travel to visit family and friends. Or go on vacation. And in some cases it means access to specialized healthcare. So that's something that, that is clearly an initial report. I hope that there'll be follow-ups and we can continue to use a football term, move the ball down the field. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited about this new committee to help at least start— also start the ball— moving the ball down the field with the increasing the— at least gaining the knowledge for how to make STEM programs more accessible, especially labs and fieldwork and software. And then I, of course, I'm still actively involved as an inventor. And part of the— one of the exciting kind of new directions I've taken is is last year, HURL was awarded the Department of Transportation Center University Transportation Center on Accessible Autonomous Vehicles and Transportation Systems. As we move forward towards electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and transportation systems, they have tremendous opportunity to reduce the barriers to transportation, which are key to to help, to work, to participation. And so we're leading that effort. And so that's— that to me is really exciting. And hopefully we can provide information that will help transform the automotive industry and transportation industry to be even more accessible to people with disabilities. Driven by the experiences and knowledge of people with disabilities.

Do you have information that the public can see about this or not?

So yes, actually the easiest way to see all of that is to follow me on LinkedIn. I am a regular— I regularly post, so our The work on both of those projects is posted on my LinkedIn page. It's also posted on our HERL website, which is simply herl.pitt.edu.

Probably easiest to find it on LinkedIn since everyone uses that. So, I mean, because I think that is so important. How many people do I know that use a wheelchair that would do not want to travel by plane. Oh, and when Judy Yimman came here to speak, on the way back they broke her wheelchair. So I mean, but there are so many people that do have issues. So I think that's so great that you're working on that. And Kelly Buckland is now with the Department of Transportation as an Assistant Policy Director. So I'm sure he'll be interested in also on what you're doing. So I know we don't have a lot of time, but tell us about your involvement again with the Paralympics.

Well, that's great. So I guess my involvement with the Paralympics started as an athlete. I had the good fortune to representing the U.S. team and even being a team captain on one international team and setting a world record, being a world champion, then went out to the Paralympics and won a bronze medal. And then I got roped into applying my scientific and engineering knowledge. What's probably a little— few people know is that my dissertation was related to wheelchair racing and modeling of wheelchair racing and design of better racing wheelchairs. So I've had a long tie there. I served in many roles. Currently, I serve in two roles. I serve on the International Paralympic Committee Task Force on Science and Technology, which is a global initiative to improve the science behind the Paralympics and the technology behind the Paralympics, including all aspects from classification to equipment used by coaches, by athletes, competition equipment, as well as equity, how the Paralympics are perceived. —very broad-ranging committee. I'm also currently serving on the Paralympic VISTA Conference Steering Committee. The VISTA Conference is the biannual conference, so held every 2 years, to give— that's globally held. One of the cool things that the Paralympics does is that the conference is free to any athlete who has competed in the Paralympics. And also the price of participating in the conference is based— varies depending on your— the World Health Organization region that you live in. So we try to make it affordable for all and make it more representative. So that's kind of exciting. I've been doing that probably for— I've been doing both of those for about 5, 6 years now. And except outside of COVID normally I would get to attend the Paralympic Games to observe the advances in technology and those areas where people might be pushing the limits of our current interpretation of the rules., and looking at opportunities for expanding the sport. The other thing that I'm interested in is related to the Paralympics too, is how do we make it more inclusive— well, one, how do we expand opportunity from— for individuals from low-income from low-income countries as well as from in higher-income countries, but with low income, but themselves have low income. So how do we increase access to sports and recreation opportunities to build pathways to the Paralympics and/or at least pathways towards living a healthy lifestyle through sports and recreation? Then, Then the other interest of mine is the— is how do we increase access for individuals who— the Paralympics calls high support needs, but basically individuals who need assistance with some activities of daily living, and so that they can be included in the Paralympics related back to issues of travel, right? If it's difficult or impossible for you to travel, then it essentially becomes difficult or impossible to reach the Paralympics. But one of the fun things on a positive side is we developed a racing chair smart wheel, which is a device to measure the efficiency of propelling a racing wheelchair. We worked with our U.S. Paralympic Training Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Urbana-Champaign, a couple of my former students there, to test and help optimize the wheelchair and the wheelchair propulsion technique of some of our U.S. athletes that competed in the Paralympic Games. And so, and one of those was, of course, was Tatiana McFadden, who won several medals in the Paralympic Games. So that was— I know, I love her.

I love her. You know, I've met her several times. She is so awesome.

She is, yeah. She's a tremendous athlete and a tremendous advocate as well. So, and, but, you know, it's nice. And one thing you may not know about me, part of my legacy is that my coach when I was training for the Paralympics was Marty Morse, who was the coach of the team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So, of course, he had to coach me from a distance, but— so I do have a little bit of a connection to the Illini, who have been tremendous contributors to wheelchair basketball and to wheelchair athletics. Probably for 50 years now. Wow.

No, I didn't know that. Yeah, you are definitely connected. As a matter of fact, when I see the Paralympics, I frequently think of you. I'm thinking, where's Roy? I should be seeing Roy somewhere. Hey, Roy, you also do a lot of international work, international research, and you've told me this before, but am I right that many countries, people do not have access to wheelchairs.

That's true. Unfortunately, globally, the World Health Organization estimates that there's about 100 million people need wheelchairs in the world, and only 20 to 25 million of them actually have access to or own a wheelchair. So that's a tremendous— and most of those individuals, probably a third of those individuals that have access or have a wheelchair don't have an adequate wheelchair. So that's a tremendous challenge. Fortunately, the Global Assistive Health Technology Committee is working to resolve that, has come out with some wonderful documents on wheelchair provision and wheelchair testing. The International Society for Wheelchair Professionals has developed educational materials that go along with that and even some entry-level credentialing, which is all steps in the right direction. Probably the most powerful thing that's happened recently is the World Health Organization has created a list of the essential assistive technologies, which is a guide for countries that provide aid to lower-income countries on what types of technologies that aid should provide, which probably the most important part about that is that there's that even such a list exists and that it takes actually a step further from the International Declaration of Human Rights of People with Disabilities that was passed by the UN to actually start to operationalize that. So there's still— there is a— Tremendous amount of work. Fortunately, there's a growing number of people that are, where that work has come to their attention and they started to address it. But we really need, I think as people, people with disabilities globally need to bond together to work to help each other because the issue of the shortage of wheelchairs is really only a symptom. There are shortages of many types of assistive technology in the world, and there are also many forms of disabilities globally that are preventable if people had access to adequate healthcare and adequate energy and sanitation and living conditions.

Yeah, it's terrible. Uh, yeah, one step at a time, but wow, so many people, so many people. And I, uh, what can any— what can someone do to help, Roy? Any of our listeners, what could they do to help?

Well, there's lots of things they can do to help. The simplest thing, you know, it's— you've been involved in enough nonprofits to know, donate your time, your talent, or your treasure, or all three, or any two of the three, to an advocacy or a or a service organization working with people with disabilities. And you and I both do that, and there are some great organizations out there, among them such as Easterseals, the World Institute on Disability, Paralyzed Veterans of America, FOH, and So, you know, I think just pick any one of the— you know, pick an organization that's closest to your heart and find a way to get involved. And then the easy thing that all of us can do is that— is one, is— well, is to— when you encounter a person with disability in any setting, is to first see their humanity and see them as people. And through that lens, when you have the opportunity, then create avenues for them, or pathways for them to get a broader, more meaningful education, to have employment opportunities, to participate in our communities from a wide range of things such as transportation to all the way to voting. So, I think if we can— I think if we can— and then I guess the other thing is vote, right? And vote in ways that help support support people with disabilities become more visible and more included.

Oh, that is, that is so true and great message. I just want to say that if you were listening and you think, oh, I wish so-and-so had heard this, remember you can subscribe to Disability Matters with Joyce Bender on Spotify. These shows are all on demand And, you know, just let people know. But thank you so much for being with us today, Rory. Joyce, thank you for the opportunity.

It's always a pleasure to speak with you, and thank you for all the great work you're doing. It's tremendously important, and it has a broad-reaching and wide impact.

Ah, yep, we're in it together, that's for sure. And with that, I'm going to end the show with quote. As you know, we end every show with a quote, and today it is C.S. Lewis who said, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." This is Joyce Bender, America's Voice, where disability matters, at voiceamerica.com. And in the words of the great Mary Brooker, choose joy.

Voice America would like to thank you for tuning in. Please join us next Tuesday at 11 AM Pacific time and 2 PM Eastern time for another installment of Disability Matters right here on the Voice America Variety Channel. We are the leader in live internet talk shows. Voice America.com.