Thursday, January 31, 2008

Perkins School for the Blind sees value in buy of IT firm

By Brendan Lynch

The Perkins School for the Blind is buying a private company for the first time in its 178-year history.

The Watertown school plans to acquire the assets of Salisbury-based Adaptive Technology Consulting Inc. and incorporate it into its in-house Perkins Products/Howe Press division, according to Perkins president Steven Rothstein. Terms of the deal, which Rothstein said is expected to be completed by March 1, were not released. The school had been working with Adaptive Technology Consulting for a few years and started talks about purchasing the company last year.

Adaptive Technology Consulting, which Rothstein said reported about $2 million in revenue last year, sells and offers training on products including tabletop magnifiers, portable computers with Braille keyboards and audio or Braille output, and children's toys.

One of the goals of the purchase is to bridge a gap in access to technology often associated with race and class, but also felt by disabled people, said Rothstein.

"This acquisition is a critical step in Perkins School for the Blind's efforts to reduce that digital divide," he said.

Adaptive Technology Consulting was founded in 1994 by Gayle Yarnall, who is blind.

"I started it to have a job," said Yarnall, who added that the initial plans were simply to make a living, hire one person and run it out of her bedroom.

The company now has eight employees. "As a blind person, I know I couldn't be doing this without technology," she said.

One of the products the company will supply is new technology developed by Wellesley-based Kurzweil Technologies Inc. and the National Federation of the Blind to be deployed on Nokia Corp.'s N82 mobile phone. Using the phone, a user can take pictures of text, which then gets converted to audible speech.

"It gives blind people much more access to knowledge and, therefore, independence," Rothstein said.

Yarnall described the deal as a win-win situation, with Perkins getting the technology component it needed and her company gaining security for the period -- still a while off, she said -- after her stewardship.

"We'll have that added oomph that Perkins will give us," she said.