Students with disabilities, from hearing and vision impairments to ADHD, have a legal right to a free and appropriate K-12 education in the United States, as well as a right to appropriate supports in higher education. Schools often meet these requirements through assistive technology, which Cynthia Curry says is technology “designed to support an individual’s functioning.”
Curry is director of the National Center for Accessible Educational Materials and the Center for Inclusive Technology and Education Systems.
For example, popular assistive technologies for students with visual impairments include braille displays and screen readers, which “read all the content on the screen, as well as buttons, links, and menus. [and] “If the image has alt text, remove the image,” she said.
What is assistive technology?
Assistive technology (AT) is the use of devices and software to enhance learning and everyday life experiences. AT can range from braille displays and books to text-to-speech software and wheelchairs. The great thing about assistive technology is that it can be anything that improves how we live and learn. However, to qualify as assistive technology, the technology must meet the needs of the individual user – it is personal in nature.
Curry’s interest in assistive technology in the classroom was also personal, beginning when she was a middle and high school science teacher. Although she was familiar with the field from her previous work as an engineer, Curry was amazed by the diversity of students in her classrooms.
Definition of Assistive Technology
Assistive technology is any device, software, or item that enhances your learning, work, or daily life experiences. AT is often used by people with disabilities, but can be used by everyone in a variety of environments.
“We really struggled with the diversity of our learners,” she says, “especially in the [with] “I had a lot of students who thought differently than I did. I was working about 16 hours a day creating my own materials and working individually with students to make up for the gaps in my education and training.”
Curry’s students came from different cultures, spoke different languages, were from different classes, and had different levels of physical and cognitive ability.
For Curry, whose sister has a disability, supporting children with disabilities was essential, and while it was required by laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), it felt “easier” than “accommodating linguistically, racially, ethnically, and even gender-diverse students.”
In other words, equal access for students with disabilities has a practical component and can be achieved in part through assistive technology.
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All technology is complementary
Some critics argue that it is silly to label some technologies as “assistive” and others simply as “technology.” All technology assists its users, whether or not you classify them as “disabled.” As Sara Hendren writes in Wired:
“Let’s be honest: what technology do you use that is not supportive? A smartphone? Glasses? Headphones? Just these three examples assist you in many different ways: by enabling or enhancing your sensory experience, or by providing navigational information. But they also enable you to decide whether or not to be approached in public, to participate in conversations or meetings in many subtle ways, and to be judged by your branding and appearance choices as belonging to one cultural group and not another… [A]Are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, so to speak, to a host of unexamined needs?
Not only is mainstream technology assistive, but technology designed for people with legally protected disabilities often also helps people without disabilities, or, more generally, improving accessibility for one group can improve accessibility for all groups in ways that are not always predictable. This is a fundamental principle of universal design.
One famous example is the curb cut, a ramp-like depression in the sidewalk that was originally designed for people in wheelchairs but has turned out to be useful for parents with strollers or rollerblades, and many other users, too.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) brings the idea of universal design into the classroom. “It’s based on research about how humans learn,” Curry says. The UDL philosophy is that lessons designed with accessibility in mind are often (though not always) designed to accommodate different learning styles and work best for everyone.
According to frameworks first developed in the 1990s, UDL lessons should present information in multiple ways. This is pretty simple: think of closed-captioned video. Closed captions make dialogue easier to understand for people who are hard of hearing, English language learners, and those trying to master unfamiliar vocabulary. Assessments should allow students to demonstrate what they know in a variety of ways, including audio recordings and written text.
Lessons designed to meet UDL specifications often have assistive technology built in or easily integrated with it. Let’s look at some examples of assistive technology and the companies behind them.
Here are 10 tools that will change the way you use assistive technology in the classroom.
Examples of Assistive Technology in the Classroom
Speechphile
Speechify is a text-to-speech software that captures text and converts it into audio format. This is especially useful for textbooks, PDF reading assignments, etc. The software is compatible with the Chrome browser, as well as iPhone, Mac, and Android. Speechify is often used by learners and students with ADHD and dyslexia.
Kurzweil 3000
Kurzweil Education’s Kurzweil 3000 is an assisted reading and writing system for Mac and various browsers that works with a wide range of assistive technologies. Its speech-to-text and text-to-speech features support 18 languages and help students with disabilities such as visual impairments and ADHD, while its font, OpenDyslexic, is designed for readers with dyslexia, with bottom-heavy letters that reduce clutter.
Google Classroom
Google Classroom has become popular due to the surge in online learning, and it also offers a number of tools for execution and speech-to-text features that improve accessibility and learning. The platform is compatible with Kurzweil 3000 and Hāpara Student Dashboard, helping students organize their tools in one place. Google plans to introduce features such as video tutorials, guided lessons, and auto-suggestions in upcoming versions of Classroom.
Tact Plus
TactPlus is a Braille printer. Often used in educational institutions, this portable printer precisely heats special foam paper to create pages of Braille (or other 3D images) in a minute or two. The printer also comes equipped with audio instructions to assist users with visual impairments.
See AI
Microsoft’s Seeing AI app is designed for people with low vision and provides voice guidance in a variety of situations. It will read text as soon as it appears in your smartphone camera’s viewfinder, identify products by barcode while you’re shopping, and describe the scenery and colors around you. Over time, it will learn to recognize your friends and describe their facial expressions.
Clicker
Clicker by Crick Software is a writing and reading platform with a series of supportive features, such as a mapping feature that allows elementary school students to create word webs, emoji-like pictograms, or diagram entire projects, which helps visual learners tackle literacy projects.
Co-authors
Co:Writer, a tool created by Don Johnston Learning Tools, can transcribe speech and predict intended words and phrases, which is a great help for students with various special needs. Developed in partnership with Google for Education, Co:Writer’s built-in prediction engine understands the basics of grammar and free association to figure out the writer’s intent even when words are misspelled or verbs are incorrectly conjugated.
Dragon
Dragon is a smart speech recognition software. It is marketed as a business productivity tool, but is also widely used as an accessibility technology for students with disabilities who have difficulty using a mouse or typing. With deep learning capabilities, the software can transcribe natural speech at speeds of up to 160 words per minute.
Math Talk
MathTalk is a speech recognition software designed for students who have ADHD or physical disabilities that prevent them from using a keyboard. An add-on to Dragon, the software understands technical terms and transcribes them into math notation suitable for trigonometry, algebra, calculus, and even doctoral courses.
Tobii Technology
Tobii offers an eye-tracking device that turns a person’s gaze into a hands-free mouse. To use the technology, students with limited motor or language skills simply look at a screen, and a combination of infrared projectors, cameras and machine learning algorithms detect the focus of their gaze.
The Future of Assistive Edtech
Looking ahead, there is room for growth in assistive technology in the classroom, and Curry sees potential in two areas in particular: artificial intelligence and mapping apps.
AI is already transforming the lives of people with disabilities, she says, but she worries that accessibility programs are relying too heavily on it, especially when it comes to working with the hearing impaired, because “AI is not yet accurate in all circumstances.”
Currently, AI often erratically generates automated closed or live captions for talks (for example, it might translate “Pokemon” as “bro give mom.”) For AI to really work, it needs “human oversight and validation,” Curry said.
But if AI can work reliably and independently, it could transform everyday life for people with a variety of disabilities: Better AI could not only hear “Pokémon” correctly, but also generate tools to help people with autism who have trouble understanding facial expressions.
Curry noted that many — but not all — students with autism struggle with this. Facial recognition technology, a branch of AI, could help students match the facial expressions and emotions of their peers and know “how to interact with them,” he said.
Another area where there is room for improvement is digital mapping: The Maps app already provides users with spoken navigation instructions and highly detailed contextual awareness of their surroundings almost anywhere in the world, but future maps could help the visually impaired in new ways.
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Curry said many blind people have memorized the layout of their neighborhoods and schools and can navigate them without assistance. But unfamiliar environments present problems: Mapping technology can’t tell which streets have uneven sidewalks and which don’t, nor can it navigate users through unfamiliar buildings — at least not yet.
Augmented reality and virtual reality [blind students] “It gives you the ability to adapt to new environments,” Curry said, “and that applies to small spaces like learning environments. So students who come into our school, maybe they’re transferring from one school district to another or transitioning from middle school to high school, are able to navigate their environment more quickly and independently.”
Of course, mapping technology only qualifies as assistive technology for students who seek independent navigation skills in the first place. Assistive technology must meet individual needs, not needs projected onto students by outsiders.
In that spirit, the ultimate assistive technology in the classroom may be the teacher asking, “Can I help you with anything?”