SuperNova Access Suite Case Study: Supernova chosen by Ohio State University.

When Jesse Owens donned his Ohio State University (OSU) running vest in Spring 1936, I suspect he had little idea of the impact he would make just months later, when he became the first athlete in Olympic history to win four gold medals. More than 65 years later Dolphin’s flagship product Supernova has also been chosen to run for OSU. Ohio State University is the world’s largest university campus. Its systems’ administrators are under pressure to maintain a huge network of diverse products for a range of faculty interests, with limited resources.

Because of this it is important that only the most reliable and stable products are loaded on their servers. They have other criteria also. Despite the fact they are dealing with a highly educated user group they always try to ensure they use low maintenance, easy to use products. OSU, as one would expect, has a transient population. Consequently, as with all the products they use, they like to minimise on product configuration and training. Sean O’Briant, OSU’s Adaptive Technology Specialist, was given the job of finding an access product which in addition to meeting the above criteria, would also combine speech and magnification in one integrated product. Sean picks up the story "We wanted an application combining magnification and voice and I hunted all over until I discovered Dolphin’s Supernova... Low vision students rave about the magnification quality and blind and print impaired students seem to grasp how to use the program faster than any of the other programme's available on the market.... It’s a very well polished program that works wonderfully well on every machine on which we've loaded it."

Steve Palmer, Dolphin’s Managing Director commented that "More and more we are hearing reassuring stories about large intelligent organisations choosing Dolphin products for the reasons cited by Sean. Systems’ Administrators base their decisions on computing fundamentals such as reliability, stability and ease of use. These guys haven’t got time to sort out issues associated with non-standard product, consequently they only buy software they know will work. Most of us do not have the time or indeed the skill to evaluate software in the same depth as people like Sean and it is obviously immensely gratifying to us as a company that Supernova is working so well both at a user level and a system level" Supernova has been running successfully on the OSU network since early 1999 and has recently been made available campus-wide to over 50000 students and faculty members. Who knows what the future will bring, star performers from OSU’s past have gone on to make history.

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