We are sad to hear of the passing of Stephen Hawking. Along with being one of the most brilliant minds of his time, he was also a steadfast advocate of assistive technology. He insisted that the technology which helped him communicate be open-source, in order to be accessible to everyone who needed it.

In honour of Professor Hawking, CBC’s The Current aired a segment on assistive technology. Dr. Gary Birch, Executive Director of the Neil Squire Society, was fortunate to be a guest on the show. You can listen to the segment here.

The system Intel developed for Professor Hawking is publicly available as the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT). You can explore the ACAT files on GitHub. Open-source technology is a big part of our work at Makers Making Change, so we believe this is useful and important.