00:05 - Simon (Host)

Good day and welcome to the inaugural episode of the Enabled podcast. Great to have your company today. This is where it begins, episode 1. I'm your host, Simon Order, and with me today is Adam Hewber, CEO of the Ability Heroes Organisation and founder of this podcast. Why are we here? Why the Enabled podcast, you might ask? Adam is going to tell you a story today about his life, his journey to creating the Ability Heroes Organisation, and by the end of the story you'll understand why we're here and maybe you too can be an Ability Hero. Adam, great to have you on this inaugural podcast. You're the man who made Ability Heroes happen and you also drove this podcast into being. I get the sense. You're not a man to give up easily on anything, and that includes learning to ride your first bike. Can you tell me a little bit about that? 

01:05 - Adam (Guest)

When I first got my first bike, my biggest problem was my balance. I had a big problem getting onto the bike in the first place before I could even ride the bike. As I learnt how to get on and off the bike, that was an achievement and that was the first step, and the second step was then to ride it. The biggest problem I had then was that my feet would get caught in the chain, it would sort of stop, and it was like being shot out of a cannon and I would be flying through the air. The best encouragement I got was when my dad used to say, well, can you do that again? So I would be going up and down, up and down, trying to perfect this riding this bike. In the end it was a bit mangled and bent and I think when he reversed over with the tractor, that was it. 

01:56 - Simon (Host)

I'm hearing from your experiences riding a bike that your early childhood has really shaped your approach to life. I understand that you had a horse that gave you more of this. I suppose. Never give up zest for life. What happened with the horse? 

02:12 - Adam (Guest)

The horse was like an oversized dog. He would eat anything. My dad thought that if I couldn't ride a bike, surely I could ride a horse. The problem was that I couldn't lift my leg over and sit on the horse, so I would be sitting on this saddle and my legs would sort of be out like sitting on a barrel. I had no strength in the legs to hold me onto the horse in the first place, so the horse would start moving. I would start and slide off the horse and I would lean up on the ground. There was only a little pining. So in the end he used to get impatient and galloped off the ground and he would want to be with the mares. So it was a short lived experience, I think. 

02:52 - Simon (Host)

I'm getting this great picture of you falling off things a lot in your younger days. Sounds quite painful, but you never gave up, which is awesome, so that's quite an example to set when you were so young. I'm curious to know how did you go at school? What was that like for you? 

03:09 - Adam (Guest)

It was going through a period of time when people with disabilities there was a sympathy sort of thing. If you weren't capable of doing a certain set of tasks, then they would categorise you as needing to go into a special class, a special class for people with disability. My school years were predominantly that. However, I was at an ordinary school instead of going to a special school, so I think my dad's perseverance in going to an ordinary school gave me resilience. If I was to be in a special school, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. 

03:50 - Simon (Host)

I remember you telling me about some fun and games you had with the stairs at school. 

03:54 - Adam (Guest)

I walked until I was 35. Up to that period I was always tripping over my own feet, my legs would give way, and all that anyway. When I was at Christchurch there was an old staircase. On the outside. There was a quicker way of going through than going inside. I would take a shot cut and because it was so well worn, I would slip and I would just be tumbling down to the end. The boys called me Flash. 

04:28 - Simon (Host)

So you left school. What happened next? The next phase of your life was about looking for a job. How did you go looking for a job? 

04:36 - Adam (Guest)

I was fortunate that when I left school we had a family business. I did some training through disability training at C&T. I worked the family business for five years and to drive the forklift, got to do all the sales stuff, loading chemicals. That was a good experience. I got my driver's license when I was 20, hand controls and a forklift license. Yeah, I learned different things and in the early days I learned a little bit about the computers and you know programs and stuff. It was a good experience.

05:12 - Simon (Host)

It sounds to me that's quite a journey you've taken, and now you're CEO of Ability Heroes, and that's an organization that advocates and empowers for those people living with a disability. Can you tell me about the beginnings of Ability Heroes? What drove you to make it happen? How did it all come together? 

05:34 - Adam (Guest)

The idea actually started from when COVID hit and I was like, well, what am I gonna do? I'm stuck, I can't go anywhere. I had a support worker that gave me this idea of perhaps going back to uni and writing about disablism. I couldn't do anything because of COVID and then she suggested maybe doing an online database. That started the whole process. I then got another support worker, Chris Dickman. After discussing with him the idea that I'd come up with, I looked at the Optus Stadium when it was first built what sort of stuff would you want if you were in a wheelchair, parents with prams, seniors - we'd start piecing it all together. It came up with this prototype, and the prototype is the basis of where we're heading. Now we're at the third stage, where now we're looking at improving on the website and also an app that accompanies that as well. 

06:37 - Simon (Host)

What Ability Heroes doing now in the website and app space? What does the future hold? Can you describe that technology? 

06:45 - Adam (Guest)

We're engaged in the community and love to get the community engaged in the project. So what our goal is the grassroots aspect of it, so we want to eventually have people from the community upload data. We started entering data ourselves and we realised it was just too hard. We can't use Google Maps or Google Photos, because there's only so much that's there. We realised that you need to be out and about when the app is up and going, that you'll be able to take a photo of a place, say the toilets or accessible park or whatever it is, and that will go on to the website. The training of the community members teaches them how to take good photos, and then it'll be a lot faster and beneficial.

07:34 - Simon (Host)

To sort of summarise in my mind what this technology is going to do. My understanding is that it's an accessibility app for those living with a disability, for seniors, for those using a PRAM, so anywhere where accessibility might be challenging and it's also going to be potentially a root planner. The data is going to be crowdsourced, developed by the community for the community. How long do you think before this is all going to happen? 

08:02 - Adam (Guest)

Give us a couple of years to get on it properly. I'd like to see VR AR speech voice commands. It's exciting times as we're moving into all these different programs and abilities, so this app is not just going to be for people in a wheelchair. 

08:22 - Simon (Host)

It's going to be for people with a vision impairment and with a hearing impairment Yep, cognitive impairment. That's a huge scope for one app. That's going to mean bringing a lot of data together, and I love what you were saying about the idea that it could be augmented reality or virtual reality. You're going to be able to see, potentially in real time, what the challenges might be and how you can navigate them. Is that the kind of big picture? 

08:49 - Adam (Guest)

Joe and I have always got big ideas, we see the sky and then we're like, okay, how do we reach that? One of the ideas that came to us when we first even sat around the table was how do we create something to get people out when people were stuck at home in COVID and all that a lot of depression and a lot of medical issues and stuff because of that situation. How can we create something that engages people and gets them out the house? They can go out, explore, do something, so that's sort of rolled into Ability Heroes, and then it's rolling and it's rolling and it's becoming more than just the websites, becoming more than just the app it's engaging with the community. I want to set up a legacy. After I've gone this thing will keep on rolling and it'll keep on developing and growing and becoming more. The opportunities are endless