Within most educational institutes there are a substantial number of students with varying physical and mental disabilities. These might range from difficulty in reading to difficulty in attending the institute. Whatever their disability, it places a barrier between them and their education. In the past few years there have been rapid and striking…

The UK's 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act has charged learning technologists with the responsibility of ensuring that electronic teaching materials can be accessed by disabled students. In an attempt to explore how learning technologists are developing practices to produce accessible electronic materials this paper will present a…

A short-term longitudinal study was conducted to investigate possible benefits of cochlear implant (CI) use on the development of phonological awareness in deaf children. Nineteen CI users were tested on 2 occasions. Two groups of deaf children using hearing aids were tested once: 11 profoundly deaf and 10 severely deaf children. A battery of…

Purpose: The objective of this research is to investigate whether home accommodations influence the amount of human help provided to a nationally representative sample of adults who use wheelchairs. Design and Methods: We analyzed data from the Adult Disability Follow-back Survey (DFS), Phase II, of the Disability Supplement to the 1994-1995…

Framed by current concerns about boys' attainment in literacy, this paper investigates the potential of talking books software to support the literacy development of male beginning readers. The study primarily considered whether typically developing boys who showed lower levels of attainment in phonological awareness would show a greater degree of…

Issues related to stigma and its impact on assistive technology (AT) use with persons having developmental disabilities are addressed. While stigma has been known to be associated with presence of disability for many years, relationship between stigma and AT usage, particularly when working with families across cultures, has only just begun to be…

While the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have made it easier for those with impairments to use public facilities, there's still much that can be done to help students with special needs access their own schools, including the library. That doesn't necessarily…

Federal legislation requires that supplementary aids and services be provided to students with diagnosed disabilities to assist them in accessing the general-education curriculum. Such modifications to the curriculum may include assistive technology (AT) devices and services. AT can be any item, piece of equipment, or teacher-made product that is…

This paper discusses the development of an assistive technology (AT) toolkit for special education teachers to use in integrating assistive technology with general curriculum standards for students with high incidence (mild) disabilities. Participants were 31 K-8 special education teacher-volunteers recruited from schools representing urban,…

This resource kit includes the following: Executive Summary; Legal Fact Sheet; Resource Guide; 26-minute "I Can Soar" Videotape; Video User's Guide; and Stories of Students Featured in Video. The materials provide tips to hep guide consumers in better integrating assistive technology (AT) within effective programs and services for children with…

This report discusses a project that adapted new automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to provide real-time speech-to-text transcription as a support service for students who are deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH). In this system, as the teacher speaks, a hearing intermediary, or captionist, dictates into the speech recognition system in a…

This book provides educators with an understanding of Asperger syndrome (AS) and how it affects a student academically and socially, and provides specific strategies for helping elementary school students with AS function successfully. Following an introductory chapter, chapter 2 presents the major areas of difficulty for individuals with AS with…

This "toolkit" document is intended to provide a culturally appropriate set of resources to address the unique political and legal concerns of people with disabilities in American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities. It provides information on education, health, vocational rehabilitation (VR), independent living, model approaches, and…

This paper describes the design and development of TruVision, an online learning environment designed to enable blind and vision impaired students to develop skills and expertise in elementary and advanced information processing strategies to enable them to seek full-time employment within industry in such positions as administrative assistants,…

The availability of assistive technology (AT) can make a tremendous difference in the ability of an individual to work, even when that individual has a severe disability. In the work context, AT serves several functions: it may make it possible to participate in an education or training program; it may make it possible to get prepared to leave the…