This paper reviews the impact that cochlear implantation has had on the practice of deaf education in terms of educational placement, communication choices, and educational attainments. Although there is variation in outcome, more children with implants are going to mainstream schools, and using spoken language as their primary means of…

The legacy of defectology, Vygotsky's theoretical work on children with disabilities, still offers a useful approach in disability research. Vygotsky understood disability as an incongruence between the individual's psychological structure and the structure of cultural forms. The incongruence describes a dialectical relation between the person…

This paper addresses a central need among people who are blind, access to inquiry-based science learning materials, which are addressed by few other learning environments that use assistive technologies. In this study, we investigated ways in which learning environments based on sound mediation can support science learning by blind people. We used…

Reading pens are a form of assistive technology that may be used to bypass weak word decoding and vocabulary skills of students with reading disabilities. Only two known studies have examined the effects of reading pens on the comprehension of school-aged students, and no known studies have been published regarding post-secondary students. The…

Many individuals with autism cannot speak or cannot speak intelligibly. A variety of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) approaches have been investigated. Most of the research on these approaches has been single-case research, with small numbers of participants. The purpose of this investigation was to meta-analyze the single…

One-Stop Career Centers serve a diverse range of customers. These include individuals with a variety of educational and work backgrounds, people from diverse racial, linguistic and ethnic cultures, as well as individuals with a wide range of disabilities and support needs. One way of addressing the needs of this diverse customer base is to develop…

Visual-cognitive loads influence the effectiveness of word prediction technology. Adjusting parameters of word prediction programs can lessen visual-cognitive loads. This study evaluated the benefits of WordQ word prediction software for users' performance when the prediction window was moved to a personal digital assistant (PDA) device placed at…

A mix of technologies and human dynamics can make good communication a workplace reality when workers cannot take for granted that they'll be understood. As more people using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) because of significant speech impairment pursue traditional paid, volunteer, and self-employment, their concerns reflect…

This article shares a story of a family with a child who has a spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy, a form of cerebral palsy (CP) that affects all four limbs and torso with debilitating muscle dysfunction. It describes how the family cares for their child's incontinence. It also shares the experience of the child's mother, Kathy, who attributes…

Students with physical disabilities face challenges because of the way they look, communicate, or behave. What children see--the visual--is often central to what they think, and in today's world the thinking of adolescents is being influenced by images more than ever before. Both still and moving images are capturing the attention of adolescents…

This study evaluated the benefits of cochlear implant (CI) with regard to emotion perception of participants differing in their age of implantation, in comparison to hearing aid users and adolescents with normal hearing (NH). Emotion perception was examined by having the participants identify happiness, anger, surprise, sadness, fear, and disgust.…

The first of these two studies assessed whether 11 participants with multiple disabilities of 5.3-18.2 (M = 10.7) years of age would succeed in combining a microswitch for accessing preferred environmental stimuli and a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA) for requesting social contact. The second study conducted a social validation assessment of…

The purpose of the study was to explore the problems faced by physical handicapped students in normal educational institutions and to find solutions to the problems faced by physical handicapped students. All the physical handicapped students studying in educational institutions in District Kohat constituted the population of the study. The study…

Cultural elements such as language, beliefs about health, and family context play important roles in the uptake of rehabilitation and treatment of deafness. Because of cultural issues, minority groups often do not receive optimal care. Focusing on the Netherlands, the researchers explored how the rehabilitation and counseling of deaf children of…

This issue of "FOCUS" describes the results from a series of comparative case studies exploring how selected national organizations, representing different stakeholder groups, can play an important role in communicating new research findings to diverse audiences. Knowledge value mapping helps understand the context of each organization's…