To efficiently create books and other instructional content from videos and further improve accessibility of our course content we needed to solve the scene detection (SD) problem for engineering educational content. We present the pedagogical applications of extracting video images for the purposes of digital book generation and other shareable…

With the advances in open-source technology, many laboratory devices can be built with a modest budget, particularly assistive laboratory devices. The current market cost of most assistive laboratory devices is a major barrier for students with accessibility needs. Specifically, for students with visual impairment, their limited choice of…

Assistive Technology (AT) revolutionized the process of learning for special needs students during the past three decades. Thanks to this technology, accessibility and educational inclusion became attainable more than any time in the history of special education. Meanwhile, assistive technology devices remain unreachable for a large number of…

Aaron Knochel, Assistant Professor of Art Education at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, introduced his preservice art education students to a growing field of design practice that focused on developing open source, affordable prosthetics to kids that could otherwise not afford them. Many of these projects involve three…

The research encapsulates the framework on potential contributions of OER practices for supporting the ICT competence for disabled adult learners in building equal opportunities within the society. The study underlined the developing OER policy and framework to focus on digital citizenship competency for disabled adult learners. OER practices can…

Written expression is a neglected but critical component of education; yet, the writing process--from prewriting, to writing, and postwriting--is often an area of struggle for students with disabilities. One strategy to assist students with disabilities struggling with the writing process is the use of computer-based technology. This article…

This paper describes accessible collaborative learning using mobile devices with mobile enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for all learners, teachers and other users. Notes taken live during lectures using…

Assistive technology (AT) by its very nature consists of a variety of personal and customized tools for multiple learning styles and physical challenges. The author not only encourages students, parents, and educators to advocate for AT services, she also wants them to go a step further and build their own AT toolkits that can instill independence…

The Australian Government's widening participation agenda--also referred to as the social inclusion agenda--considers equity through the triple focus of access, participation and outcomes. These foci are catalysts for re-examining teaching and learning approaches in formal education. This article considers this national refocus and the…

This article describes an outreach program to broaden participation in computing to include more students with visual impairments. The precollege workshops target students in grades 7-12 and engage students with robotics programming. The use of robotics at the precollege level has become popular in part due to the availability of Lego Mindstorm…