Posted on | May 2, 2012 | 213 views | No Comments
Students with disabilities had limited resources at OSU when it came to assistive technology ? until now
?by Adam King
Students with disabilities want an educational experience just like any other student while attending Ohio State, but it?s taken advancing technology to maximize that experience.
The Office for Disability Services has offered a computer lab with assistive technology software loaded onto each station. But having the software in only one location precluded disabled students from collaborating with classmates at the many computer labs across campus and hamstrung students who did not have the technology on their own computers when the ODS lab was closed.
Ohio State student and Office for Disability Services technician Peter Meuller demonstrates how to use ZoomText, an assistive technology for people who are visually impaired or diagnosed with dyslexia.
One student who didn?t own the technology told ODS Director Lois Harris that when the ODS office closed, it was like a wall had gone up for her, Harris said.
That finally changed winter quarter as 1,000 computers received assistive technology that is dispensed from a central server.
?Our goal has always been seamless access, not just access, and this certainly makes access a lot more seamless,? said L. Scott Lissner, Ohio State?s Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. ?It?s about universal design, doing it in the most integrated fashion possible and letting informal education experiences happen at odd times and all over the place. To me, that?s the real driver, and a few years ago the technology wouldn?t have allowed us to do this.?
It took seven months of ODS Assistive Technology Training Center Coordinator Abdirahim Abdi and Ken Petrie, director of the Web Accessiblity Center housed in ODS, working closely with the Office of the Chief Information Officer to ready 1,000 computers. There are still some computing locations the ODS would like to identify for upgrades, but it?s a major step forward for a university that prides itself on creating an inclusive environment.
Ohio State was one of the first universities to add curb cutouts in response to disabilities act legislation in the 1970s, and ever since it?s been a university theme to be forward-thinking about access.
ODS has approximately 2,000 students with disabilities registered in its office, and one in five people worldwide have some form of disability. Visitors with disabilities to OSU will have access to some of these computers as well.
This latest upgrade puts three of the most-popular assistive technologies on each computer, including:
- JAWS ? Job Access for Windows allows visually impaired users, including those who are completely blind, to navigate documents and the internet with voice commands while the program reads the documents or contents of the browser to the user.
- ZoomText ? Made for the visually impaired or those diagnosed with learning abilities such as dyslexia, it allows for materials on the screen to be enlarged or have their contrast altered. Text lines can be highlighted and the cursor can be used to narrowly focus the highlight to individual words.
- ?Read and Write Gold ? Among its many functions, it provides text to speech and speech to text, a phonetic spell checker for fixing errors common with dyslexia, a screen masker to help people who have troubling focusing and a reader for text.
?Read and Write Gold changed the way I do homework and study,? one student noted on the recent ODS customer satisfaction survey. ?It literally reads whatever I give it and I can even create mp3 files from class readings. I am dyslexic and it has helped immensely.?
When such technology was just a pipe dream, visually impaired students had to pay others to read them the class material, and the ODS hired scribes to work with the students to complete tests.
?It wasn?t impossible, but it wasn?t easy,? Lissner said.
There are still some hiccups. Assistive technology can?t read electronic documents such as those posted to CARMEN, certain textbooks and web pages that don?t have the proper computer coding, something ODS runs across on a regular basis at Ohio State.
?Sometimes it?s because of what a professor scanned in or material from a third-party source that is not well designed,? Lissner said. ?It?s not an insurmountable problem, but it?s a resource-intensive problem when we have to do it after the fact.?
Any instructor can contact ODS at 292-3307 or ods@studentlife.osu.edu for help in creating course materials that are assistive technology friendly. Students and visitors to OSU can contact ODS to find the locations of the assistive technology computers.
?All of the research says students who use assistive technology regularly tend to be successful and their problems fall in the range of typical student issues and not access issues,? Lissner said. ?Having the technology available at this level is really cutting edge, and there certainly aren?t a lot of other large universities doing it.?
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