Maryland company works to provide assistive technology

From The Gazette in Maryland. In the picture, Jessica Moseley, 24, her sister Carissa Aiello, 22, and their mother Myrna Aiello run TCS Associates, a Wheaton company that provides assistive technology for people with disabilities.

Rockville resident Myrna Aiello grew up deaf in an age where she was totally reliant on the people around her.

To make a phone call, she would write a message on a piece of paper and ask a family member to relay it. She was lucky if someone around happened to know sign language and could translate what she wanted to say.

"It was very frustrating because I couldn't get my message across the way I wanted to," Aiello said.

Such an environment was never conducive to success, she said. In school, the teachers didn't know sign language and had difficulty communicating with her, and often counted her out early on.

"They said, ‘There's no way you could pass this class,'" she said.

But today, Aiello holds multimedia video conferences, can instantly reach a translator at anytime anywhere in the world and essentially lives and works unassisted.

"Technology has made my life much easier," she said.

And with the help of technology, she has made her living out of providing technology, and an easier life, to others with disabilities.

Aiello is the CEO and president of Wheaton-based TCS Associates, a family company that provides assistance technology to organizations that support people with disabilities. Her daughters work with her: 24-year-old Jessica Moseley as the director of business operations and 22-year-old Carissa Aiello as the account manager.

Although Carissa and Jessica are not deaf, they have used sign language their whole lives. (Aiello's husband is also deaf.) They constantly sign to their mother, who can read lips and wears a magnetic, surgically-implanted hearing device to distinguish between sounds.

Much like their mother, Jessica and Carissa say one of their goals at TCS is leveling the playing field for people with disabilities. They think of that one deaf person who is left out of a last-minute meeting because there is no interpreter around. If the company had access to international video interpreter call centers, that wouldn't happen, Moseley said.

As the two have grown up, they say technology has also changed the ways they communicate with their parents. Flashing the lights on and off, stomping on the ground and screaming has been replaced with Web cameras, video calls and text messages.

More than anything else, "technology is the best tool for people with disabilities," Carissa said.

But the kind of technology the family sells — among them speech-to-text software, portable translation devices, double-handed and mouth stick keyboards, and video telephone service — aren't just being used by people with disabilities.

Surgeons now use the speech-to-text software to transcribe their notations during a surgery, and doctors are using similar software to digitize their records, Moseley said.

She and Myrna Aiello said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which send home thousands of newly disabled soldiers, has forced many workplaces to start thinking about assistance technology.

"You're looking at thousands of people who have to go back into the workplace with disabilities, and the world doesn't know how to handle that," Moseley said.

But one hurdle is the cost of specialized technology and software, said John Nousaine, the chairman of the assistive technology subcommittee for the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Independent Living, a nonprofit that advocates for independent living rights for people with disabilities.

Nousaine said there's no doubt technology has changed the way people with disabilities live. Technology offers "the ability to compete with their able-bodied peers" in the workplace. But he said 80 percent of people with disabilities live below the federal poverty line, so it's up to the companies they work for to provide the at-work assistance they need.

Still, what has become an expensive niche field is on the horizon of breaking more ground and becoming more mainstream and affordable. Myrna Aiello said she's heard of a Blackberry being developed in Italy that would allow callers, disabled or not, to have video conversations.

A device such as that would revolutionize her life even more, she said.

And technology will continue to grow from there, giving people like her mother and father a chance "to be able to be equal to a hearing peer and allow them to be just as successful," Moseley said.