ONE thing that Chris Quickfall has learned in his time is that, when you’re training someone with a disability, the disability shouldn’t dominate the process.

Quickfall set up Invate in 2006, not long after he was diagnosed with dyslexia, in a bid to offer technologies to help disabled people in education and employment.

“It’s one of the largest assistive technology companies in the North East now”, he said. “But this stuff isn’t a magic box. Training is the key to unlocking the technology.

“We subcontracted a training provider for a while, but we felt that it needed to be more tailored to the individual. That’s when we took the training in-house and brought in two neuropsychologists to look at how individuals think.”

This is the root of E-Quality Learning, a spin-out firm that offers online and face-to-face training to individuals in employment and education. The firm has been going on its own for a year now, and recently won the start-up award at the Cels Business for Life awards. Its 15 staff could rise to 45 or more by the end of the next financial year in November 2012.

However, the ethos of the company is built on an early piece of advice that Quickfall got from his neuropsychologists.

“They came back to me and said grouping people by disability was the wrong thing to do,” he said.

“Instead, we created our training framework, where we spend about five to 10 minutes talking about what the person wants out of the training and how their disability affects them; what their issues, barriers and coping strategies are. We’re not so focused on the disability. It’s about as important as what kind of job you do. I don’t want anybody to train in the same way as the one before. If you get 1,000 people in a room with dyslexia, it could well affect them in 1,000 different ways.

“We’re probably the only company in this field that uses neuropsychologists. We’re trying to bring in a bit of science to make sure we deliver the right training for the individual’s needs.”

The company spent over £30,000 on a year of research in conjunction with Northumbria University, and hired in North East firms AYO Media and Keltie Cochrane to deliver its website. Keltie Cochrane handled the web design, while AYO carried out the web development work. The site features a few little touches that are designed to be as friendly as possible to users, such as a top menu bar with all the necessarily information included, and a resource library with a growing bank of over 350 training videos on products from Microsoft Word to MindManager mind mapping software and Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software. It also offers in-session recording, which allows the user to re-visit the process at a later date.

Each resource is offered in both plain text and video, and Quickfall said the site was designed with an attention to detail that occasionally clashed with the budget.

For example, he said: “It’s been noted that when people watch a video to learn, they tend to jump around. The neuropsychologists said that was a red flag, as the brain is kicked out of learning mode and into another mode if the video needs to buffer.

“As a result we’ve needed enormous server power at the back end to make sure it doesn’t need to buffer as much. It pretty much doubled the cost of the project.”

However, the site itself isn’t the only method of getting hold of the training. E-Quality Learning also offers face-to-face training to those who prefer it, and Quickfall says the need to provide tailored learning means that the trainers need to be trained even more rigorously to pick up on body language.

“The development of technology has completely changed how training can be offered. It can be difficult to bring new products to market. We’ve seen a lot of resistance to online training, but once they see the effort put in and the possibilities, they’re a lot more positive.”