By 9 a.m., more than 300 people have already gathered at National Taiwan University’s track oval. Kan adjusts his sunglasses, arranges his hair and makes sure that the Dr. More accessories fans have brought him are put on properly. Groups of friends and relatives within earshot shout words of encouragement to pump him up: “Looking good!”
Before he ascends the stage, a friend passes him a bottle of spring water, with its cap removed. Not expecting the cap to be off, Kan grabs and tilts it. It happens so quickly that onlookers cannot warn him. Half of the bottle’s contents spills over his shirt, pants, shoes and socks. Those around him fall silent, as some friends pull out tissues, uncertain whether to try to sop it up with water. “That feels good. This is just what I need.”
Joey Kan, Russ’s younger brother, said, “He wants to break through society’s stereotypes about the handicapped being clumsy and gauche.”
A technology upstart losing his sight at 28
His story reads familiar: He had worked for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and Yahoo Taiwan Holdings Ltd. and fell victim to glaucoma, but he overcame adversity to become the first blind student to earn a doctorate at National Chiao Tung University. Now he hosts the Dr. More fan page on Facebook.
What is less known is that this story has an outstanding sequel. The latest twist in the plot has Kan seeking to build a new platform that is accessible to people with a variety of disabilities, thereby realizing his dream of leveraging caring technology on behalf of the disabled community.
Kan will never forget how painful it was for him when his vision continued to deteriorate even after 11 operations. It was like a horror movie, gradually darkening in anticipation of eternal night. The final fully darkened screen represented the culmination of all fears. But, ironically, it was not a movie. It was real life.
Back then, his room was lit up brightly day and night, as he desperately grasped for glimmers of light. He often waved his hands in front of his face. At first he could see his fingers, barely. “Then I watched as the contours of the fingers faded. My hands began to look something like the Japanese manga cat Doraemon’s fist. Eventually they completely disappeared.”
Ultimately, while putting on a happy face for his family and friends, he obtained some charcoal fire starter fluid, preparing for the worst. Fortunately, his plan was discovered, and with his family and friends’ support, he began to rebuild his life. For a long time after losing his sight he never expressed his affections to others, but one day, while his mother was cooking, he groped his way along walls into the kitchen and hugged her from behind. As tears streamed down his face, he offered her an apology: “I’m sorry that I didn’t care for myself well and became a burden for the family.”
Since that time, taking care of himself became Kan’s key life performance indicator. After that goal was established, what followed was execution and management.
“He’s completely action-oriented. You couldn’t stop him if you tried,” Joey Kan said with a wry smile. Six months ago his brother announced to the family that he was planning on living alone, and moved from Taishan District in New Taipei City to the Minsheng Community of Taipei proper. “Through these actions,” Joey Kan said, “my older brother showed us that our worrying wasn’t going to stop him, so we might as well just stop worrying.”
For half a year, Kan took the bus to work every day. If the environment was not unfamiliar to him, he could usually navigate it by himself. He wanted to take himself out of his comfort zone and prove that he was capable of managing life by himself.
Alex, a friend of Kan for 10 years, witnessed the process. When his friends harped on their concerns, he would tell them, “Nagging me more isn’t going to change my mind.” Near the start of the journey, Kan clammed up at a get-together with friends after one of them made some insensitive comments. It was exceedingly awkward for everyone.
Today, when Kan invites friends over to his place, he often jokes about how much money he saves by keeping the lights off. When dumbfounded or exasperated, he will quip, “It may not appear that I’m rolling my eyes, but that’s only because my eyes are already all white.”
Once when he and a friend were having a meal at a pub, his probing fork happened to land immediately on the exact item of food he wanted, and his friend joked, “No way. You’re a fraud. You’re not blind.” He happily responded, “Do I scare you? I’m pretty cool for sure.”
Social participation and fighting against an unfriendly system
“I returned to participate in regular society once again,” Kan said. After rehabilitation therapy, and figuring out how to handle eating, dressing, living and transportation, he also began to explore how to satisfy his needs for leisure and entertainment.
For instance, he has gone to Amit concerts and created different columns on his blog devoted to listening travel or listening to films. Recently, he has joined the crowds going to listen to “Jurassic World” in theaters.
Yet he also needed to bring a friend along. “I asked him in hushed tones to tell me why people were laughing. It was pretty humbling,” Kan said, adding that it was not the most humbling situation he has had to deal with.
“Disabled people need to be tough to cope with the indignities they suffer at the hands of an unfriendly system.” Once a ticket seller came to the mistaken conclusion that Kan was trying to cheat his way into getting a discounted ticket, it was not until he politely pulled out his disabled identity card that he could buy a ticket.
Recently, when he has been out shopping on his own, he likes to playfully challenge shop clerks, asking them to describe the colors of pants and shirts.
Kan has met some friendly shop attendants. In Uniqlo stores, they have several times helped him put together a trendy outfit. But he has also encountered discrimination when shopping. Once at a major clothing chain store, he asked where he could find trousers. “Suit pants? They’re over there,” came the unhelpful reply.
Working on his doctorate also stimulated and inspired him in new ways. When writing his dissertation, he gradually made his way toward a new method of writing, but at critical moments he often experienced technical obstacles.
For instance, speech output systems on computers can only read Illustration No. 1 and Illustration No. 2. If there is no one around to help describe the image, then even simple symbols and graphic components such as square root signs and the x and y axes of graphs—things that most readers will grasp in an instant—baffle the browsing blind person.
“Why not leverage the power of technology to provide spoken descriptions of images?” Kan thought. A tech geek through and through, he began to conceptualize ways of making life easier for the visually impaired before his dissertation was even finished.
“It’s an ambitious project,” Kan explained. The i-AIM system under development not only will help meet the needs of the visually impaired for food, clothing, shelter, transportation and leisure, it is also aimed to powerfully serve the public interest as a caring technology.
Kan turned the project into a job opportunity for the disabled, allowing people who were physically disabled but not visually impaired to find employment as oral describers of images. They can work from home helping the visually impaired, creating a circle of mutual assistance among the disadvantaged.
Take Fei-fei. “I couldn’t take care of my own needs,” she said. “How could I help someone else? It was something I had never dreamed possible.” Paralyzed following a car accident 10 years ago, Fei-fei was forced to suspend her education after 10th grade. She spent three years lying in bed at home.
As far as she was concerned, the realm of her youth was the ceiling above her. After being rebuffed in several attempts to find employment, three years ago she began to do simple word processing from home. Hand atrophy makes her have to forcefully open her palms from time to time. Whenever the tip of her finger lacks strength to hit the keyboard, she has to use her knuckles instead.
When she is working, Fei-fei has to ask members of her family to adjust her seating position so as to prevent bedsores. They also have to make time to empty her bedpan. If just one detail of her care is off, trouble may ensue. She works eight hours a day, and it is not uncommon for her to continue well into the night.
Training and work opportunities
With the encouragement of Kan, Fei-fei has agreed to receive training. She hopes to become one of the first group of professional oral describers. She is far from alone: Quite a few physically disabled people have expressed interest in joining her. They too hope the training will lead to new career possibilities.
“My whole life I’ve felt that I’ve been a bother to people, but it turns out that we can help people too,” Fei-fei said, barely able to contain her enthusiasm. Unfortunately, society lacks understanding about the visually impaired, and Kan has encountered many obstacles in his entrepreneurial journey.
He has been told his design was not cool enough. Someone even asked him, “Aren’t you a technologist? Why don’t you create a fancy app?”
Kan laughed and responded with a question of his own: What about the needs of the users? If users are visually impaired or elderly, they will already be intimidated enough. Should they be forced to navigate their way through menus and submenus? “Making it accessible to the users despite their handicaps is what I want to do,” he said.
Several times, Kan went through a long negotiating process with potential partners only to come up just short of making a deal. His friends would be upset, but he would calm them down: “Even though we weren’t able to cut a deal, we were still able to push forward a conception of caring technology. That’s awesome in itself.”
DJ Douzi of i like radio, operated as part of Taipei-based Broadcasting Corp. of China’s Pop Network, has worked with Kan and witnessed how he used humor to deal with adversity. At one point the DJ asked: “Is there anything that would piss you off?”
There was one time when Kan almost lost control. He often discusses app development issues with headphones on, but once he got so frustrated that he tore off his headphones and had to calm himself down by temporarily leaving the work environment. Within a few minutes he had regained his composure.
Yang Yu-hsin, a legislator whose body is half paralyzed and suffers severe atrophy, understands the trials and tribulations faced by Kan. “It’s a fight. A fight with the outside world, but even more within oneself,” she said. As Kan has rushed around the Legislative Yuan and various government agencies making his case, Yang has been pained by his struggles.
Thanks to Kan’s hard work, an app making prescription drug information accessible to the visually impaired is now online at more than 21 hospitals around Taiwan. One simply needs to pass the medicine bag’s QR code in front of a smartphone to hear accurate information about the prescription.
But there is so much more Kan wants to do. Apart from raising funds and pushing early stage development of i-AIM, which is his key performance indicator this year, he also has established a long-term goal for himself: Creating a platform that is accessible to people who are disabled in a variety of ways. Moreover, he wants to broaden the scope of those targeted to include the elderly.
As Kan throws himself into this work, his family and friends cannot help but grow anxious: There he goes overworking himself again, they think. Aside from his day job at the Institute for Information Industry, in the evening he is extremely busy with i-AIM, raising money, handling publicity, carrying out system calibration and improving service.
“After I get off from work,” he said with laugh, “I’ve got another full-time job.” But there is so much he wants to finish. “There’s no time to slack off.”
[by Chen Hong-jin / tr. by Jonathan Barnard]