Get the word out!

As some of you know, I work at the Special Education Assistive Technology Center (SEAT) Center at Illinois State Univeristy. A couple colleagues of mine have been engaged in research related to using technology with young children who are either at-risk or have been identified as having a disability. They have recently launched a survey to further this line of research. From their survey:

The purpose of this project is to examine the experiences and needs of parents having young children with disabilities with a focus on technology tools that can support them. We hope to learn about fathers' experiences and needs to help us develop recommendations and guidelines for professionals who work with parents of young children with disabilities.

They are looking for parents of young children with disabilities to complete this survey. This is a good opportunity to ensure that the voice of families with young children with disabilities can be heard and, potentially, have influence over policy and practice.

The link to the survey is https://forms.coe.ilstu.edu/sed/TakeSurvey.aspx?PageNumber=1&SurveyID=86L1872.

Please share this link with others to get the word out!

Intel Reader...accessiblity in the palm of your hand?

At ATIA a couple weeks ago, the Intel Reader created a bit of a buzz. A number of people now know about the KReader and KNFB Reader from Kurzweil which allow a person to use a Nokia phone to take a picture of a piece of text, process the picture using OCR, and then use text to speech to have the text read to the user. The Intel reader does all of that and a bit more. While a bit bigger and bulkier, there are some really nice features. Check out the video below:

What are your thoughts?

Are we outpacing ourselves?

I just got back from Disney World and, while I was there, I went to "The Land" in EPCOT (which incidentally stands for Every Person Comes Out Tired).  While I was in line waiting for one of the rides, I was reading a bunch of quotes on the wall that all had to do with saving the environment.  One quote, in particular, got my attention:

While I know this quote is not about the landscape of education, it does have relevance to what we are currently experiencing in education.  The citizens we are preparing to enter this world must have skills that are very different that students we were preparing even 5 to 10 years ago.  Think about it.  I know this is nothing new but it does cause me to ponder the total systemic impact of this change.  It reminds me of poster I had in my dorm during college with the quote:

We shall require a substantially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive.

I thought for a long time that this quote was anonymous.  It was years later that I linked it to Albert Einstein.  Amazing how these quotes...made so many years ago...have such applicability to what we face today!

How will you keep up?  How will you survive?

What happens when innovation outpaces accessibility?

I was presenting to a group of higher education faculty the other day on Universal Design for Learning and how they could move forward on creating creating course that were more aligned with the principles of UDL.  The morning was presented largely by a colleague of mine and she worked to establish the foundation of UDL in higher education settings specifically focusing on Multiple Means of Expression, Engagement, and Representation.  The afternoon was my part and focused on using technology-based tools to help integrate these principles within courses and discussions ensued as to how each of these tools could achieve multiple means of expression, engagement and representation.  As part of the discussion, we also talked about accessibility.  We talked about accessibility for two reasons.  First, part of being 'universal' is ensuring that everyone can access and interact with the content being provided.  Second, Illinois passed the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act whcih requires Illinois agencies and Universities to ensure their various information technologies are accessible to people with disabilities.  This law extends ADA and Section 508 compliance within the state of Illinois.  The point of discussion that ensued thereafter is what really got me thinking.  A number of the tools that I presented are accessible and/or increase the accessibility of content only in part or only for specific populations.  For example, I spoke about using the tool VozMe, which is a little widget that can be put on a page and, when a person highlights the text of a web page and clicks on the button, there is a speech equivalent version generated.  However, when we tried to work this through a popular screen reader, the tool was not accessible.  I know this sounds redundant (using a screen reader tool to access a tool/service that provides text to speech) but similar cases could be made for embedding audio, video, VoiceThreads and many other tools/services as well.  If only partial accessibility is provided by the use of these tools, can they be considered to be 'universal'?  I would suggest that they are not.

I would propose, at this point and time, that UDL is a philosophical construct...a vision of 'what could be', if you will.  There are a number of things that are preventing UDL from being truly realized currently.  Copyright law prevents standard print from being truly accessible to all.  To access print in an accessible form, individuals often need to be 'certified' as being eligible to access the print in a form that meets their individual needs.  The explosion of user generated web content has left a plethora of online resources with limited or no accessibility.  There are a number of concerns with the degree to whcih Web 2.0 technologies are meeting the standards of accessiblity.  Even emerging technologies such as the Kindle DX are not exempt.  Truth be told, accessibility is still an afterthought of innovation.  Until accessibility is proactively integrated into tool development,  UDL can not  be fully achieved.

Until this time, however, we are left to approximate UDL by using a number of different tools to move towards multiple means of expression, engagement and representation, some with more accessibility than others.  The questions that I am left with, however, from both an ethical and legal perspective, are:

1. Do we use a variety of tools, some fully accessible and some partially accessible, to approximate UDL or do we only use those tools that are currently accessible to all? 
   
2. If we only use those tools that are fully accessible, knowing that in doing so we are placing limits on the use of other innovative tools, do we limit the degree to which UDL can be provided?  Is this an acceptible practice?

What do you think?