On any given day, you might find Daniel Stickney surfing or scuba diving in the Pacific Ocean, participating in his college’s student government, or assisting engineers to make technology more accessible. He’s traveled the world and learned new languages. You could say the 22-year-old has a great life, that he holds the world in his hands.
The fact that he can hold anything in his hands is little short of a miracle, considering that shortly after his birth the doctors told Danny’s parents that he had cerebral palsy and would likely live his life in a fetal position.
“Daniel is a gift from God,” says his father, Dyer, a single parent who made it his mission to do whatever he could to help Danny live as independent a life as possible. Finding little help close to home, Dyer expanded that mission to other parts of the world in search of therapies that would prove the doctors wrong. Thanks to intense physical therapy at a young age, Danny is able to use his hands well enough to do many things others with his disability can’t.
Yes, I’m disabled, and…
Danny’s disabilities are merely conditions, hardly limitations. When I first sat down to talk with him and his older brother, Stanford, I asked Danny to tell me about his disabilities. He told me that he is legally blind due to cortical visual impairment, which limits his vision to a periodic sliver from the edge of his right eye.
I expected him to talk about his CP, so I prompted him for more. I got silence.
Stanford explained that Danny was raised without awareness of his disabilities. It wasn’t something he paid attention to until fairly recently. Stanford explained that their father refused to let any of the children’s limitations prevent them from participating fully in life. The focus is always on what each member of the family can do, not what they can’t. Never why, always why not.
Stanford then prompted Danny to talk about his CP, and Danny spoke briefly about his use of a wheelchair. He quickly shifted the conversation to how much he enjoys speaking with people in retirement homes to help them make their own transition to using a wheelchair. The more I tried to get him to talk about himself, the more he talked about how he loves helping others.
Danny is also a “big man on campus” at the College of Adaptive Arts in San Jose, where he takes classes and is vice president of the student government. When he’s not in school, he gives a lot of his time volunteering with various organizations. He is currently a board member for the California chapter of TASH, a disability advocacy organization, and was a featured speaker at its 2015 national conference.
Danny navigates a sidewalk in Los Gatos, CA, during filming of “A Day with Danny” for the Google Accessibility Team.
Shaping tech access
Like any “millennial,” Danny loves technology. He and Stanford had the opportunity to hear Charles Chen of the Google Accessibility Team speak at the Vista Center Blind Expo in Palo Alto, CA, about the work the team was doing to make technology accessible to everyone. They chatted with Charles afterward and soon were meeting with the team and testing a variety of equipment and applications designed to help the visually impaired and people with limited or no fine motor skills access technology.
Danny was also featured in a Google Accessibility documentary called “A Day With Danny,” which was used internally and to promote the company’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities program, through which it is donating $20 million to 29 non-profits that are using technology to address a variety of accessibility challenges.
A better wheelchair
This summer I spent an afternoon at Danny’s home in Los Gatos, CA, to observe what Danny called a “Makeathon.” A group of young engineers and creative problem solvers lived with Danny and his family for a week to observe him and develop ways to help him in his daily life.
Danny and his brother, Stanford (back row, left), take a break for a group photo with the “Makeathon” engineers.
By the time the group departed, Danny had a wheelchair equipped with infrared sensors that alert him to obstacles and dangers as he moves about. The engineers used existing technology to design a new type of detection system that alerts Danny when he nears stairs or other potential dangers. They will share what they learned in the open-source community in hopes that others will take their information and adapt it to solve other problems.
Two of the engineers, Stephanie Valencia and Tomas Vega, are co-founders of Assistive Labs, a “global team of dreamers and doers” working to “increase access to assistive devices for people living with disabilities in global markets by collaboratively building adapted and affordable devices” in the areas of health, education, communication, and mobility.
(I will be writing specifically about the “Makeathon” and Assistive Labs in a separate post, so stay tuned. And I hope to include video of me driving an early version of Danny’s retrofitted wheel chair. Too funny to miss!)
What’s next?
Danny views his future as limitless. He wants to continue his advocacy work for people with disabilities, particularly those who are visually impaired or who use a wheelchair. “I love to be involved in the community,” he says. “When I get a chance to help people with disabilities, I try to make life better for them.”
“I want to make it clear that even though I’m in a wheelchair I’m still a human being,” he says. “Anything I think I can do, I can do.”
Special Ops 