One Saturday afternoon, mom and grandma went shopping at Costco. A big store on a busy day. Mom tries to avoid Costco on Saturdays. That day they happened to meet a man who was using his eyes to communicate. Same age. Same body movements. Same type of spastic. Another version of me. Yet this man was controlling his communication board in a crowd with his eyes. Unbelievable. He probably thought my grandma and mom were crazy. Not everybody likes talking to total strangers. That point of time my device was in the process of dying. They exchanged numbers for us to get together. 

The man offered to show me his board and how he managed to control the mouse. My parents and I went to his house. I drove next to him and just watched. The device he has is an Accent1400 from the PRC-Saltillo. Before that night, I had only heard of dynavox and tobii. He has been using it since elementary. Is Accent1400 the answer? Weeks later the PRC Saltillo representative came to my home and let me try the board. I was able to control it from my chest range. With the dynavox’s eyegaze, it had to be about my height in order to read my eyes. I got excited that I didn’t have the new technology taken off when going into our van. After a lot of paperwork and phone calls, I got my new communication board right before Christmas. Then on Christmas morning, my old device crashed. What perfect timing! 

All of sudden, I went from typing with my nose to using my eyes. A big adjustment. It took a lot of time and patience. I got to used to staring at a screen hours after hours. Plus PRC-Saltillo has their own software program. They custom over forty pages of certain words. Even to this day I am still learning where most of the words are. It is like learning another whole language. However, it is faster than just using a keyboard with words predictions which I was using for many years. This device does have words predictions. The downside is that it doesn’t immediately capitalize every first word. Plus it is not as easy to edit my writings as Series 5 software. It is still workable. Most people wonder how does eyegaze work. It track my eyes. When I stare at a button for a certain length of time, the mouse clicks. That’s basically it. When I want to watch a video, I stare at the top of the device to pause. It is a sweet technology, however the eyegaze doesn’t work out in the sun. That is a big disadvantage. Hopefully that will get solved. 

I am grateful that mom and grandma met the young man.