Ramona Batista always warned her three sons against letting others make important choices for them.

That family credo went unchallenged until one September night in 1995, when a drive-by gunman left 12-year-old Richard with few alternatives. The young boy was shot in the head as he and his cousins were driving home on the 110 freeway from a baseball game at Dodger Stadium.

After three weeks in a coma and five more months in recovery, Richard finally left Martin Luther King Hospital paralyzed from the neck down with speech, vision and cognitive disorders.

But he remembered his mother's advice. No stranger with a gun, he vowed, would make life decisions for him.

With a reservoir of inner strength and high-tech and human assistance from UCLA's Disabilities and Computing Program (DCP), the California High School student has reclaimed his hold on a bright future. He is graduating with a 4.0 GPA.

More than a year ago, Richard's prospects were dimmer because he lacked the skills to work independently. His high school had adaptive hardware and software enabling disabled students to use computers with voice instead of keyboard commands. But Richard's teachers told him the software wouldn't work for him because he speaks haltingly and softly after a bout of pneumonia weakened his lungs.

"Every time I tried to use the software, people told me it wouldn't work for me. They turned me away," Richard recalled. "I felt nothing was working for me." Luckily, a family friend led the Batistas to UCLA's Academic Technology Services and DCP, the unit that helps disabled faculty, students and staff become computer-proficient.

Since then, the change has been dramatic, said his mother, who drives in from Whittier so that her son can work with adaptive technology specialist Kevin Price.

"He was discouraged in the beginning; now he's very confident," said Price, who has worked with Richard over the last year to use speech-recognition software to do different tasks and trained him to use other programs. "He has the motivation and skills. It's very encouraging to see technology work for people and give them access."

"Kevin has been there for me, helping me, and I'm grateful for that," said Richard, now 18 and looking forward to attending Cerritos College.

"When Richard comes here, he feels he can do something on his own," said his mother. "He hadn't been able to do that for six years. This has made a great difference in his life. He's hit so many walls, and people told him there was no hope. But here at UCLA, they helped him as an individual." Here, everything fell into place."