Assistive Technology

Monday in class we watched a video called Freedom Machines about Assistive technology. While I've never had use for the kinds of technology needed and demonstrated in the video, I've had a bit of experience with some of it in my previous career.

Two of the people featured in the movie, (Bonita and Kent) used a program called JAWS that is essentially a screen reader for the blind. While working at the University of Notre Dame's Help Desk we had a student who also used JAWS and visited us from time to time for help. The thing that amazed me about JAWS was that it didn't JUST read the text on the screen, it read where your mouse was pointing. This is amazingly helpful if you're on the internet. Imagine if every time you went to a different page on a website, it read all the header information, all the menus, ads, and all of the things you really don't care about. I'd give up pretty quick just from annoyance. But it's smart enough to read the section your mouse is hovering over.

Another thing that stuck out to me from the video was how expensive these things were, that the schools were expected to pay for them, and that in some cases, only 1 or 2 students at a time could benefit from them. That sounds harsh at first blush, but if you're a school administrator who has to deal with a ever decreasing budget and are struggling to just keep your teachers paid, it's hard to find money for an Assistive technology to help one child in your school. While I agree that every student should have the opportunity to learn in the classroom, and this kind of technology is far and away some of the best ways to help with that, in most cases, schools just don't HAVE the money to put toward these things. It seems like pressure would be better put on government to give grants to schools for A.T. so that the money is there when and if it's needed, rather than forcing a school board to decide between having enough teachers, and having the tools to teach our special needs students.

One other thing that really jumped at me in this video was how varied these students handicaps were. Lets say you're an inventor and you decide you want to make a keyboard for people who are physically handicapped. Where do you start? Well, you look at the handicaps that are prevalent in the world, and see that, for instance, 75% of physically handicapped people have a hard time finding the keys on a keyboard. Great, you've found a problem, and a group of people you can help. So you develop a keyboard where the keys are maybe spread a little further apart so keys aren't accidentally pushed, and you also tie it to some kind of predictive text input software so that typing the letters "SOFTW" might auto-complete to "SOFTWARE." You take it to market, you charge a reasonable price for the device to recoup your costs and make some money for yourself and think you've helped the world. And you have! but what about the other 25%? Some of them can't use their fingers properly, some of them can't control their arms at all, some have NO arms! Handicaps aren't standardized. If they were, we'd have solved this issue long ago. Can we help a blind person read? Yes! We can give them braille books! But what about a blind person with no hands, or physical problems as well? Umm, well, we could use audio-books! Well, that helps, but what about books that haven't been converted to audio? Do we limit the experience of this subset of handicapped people, or do we find another way to help them?

This is a big messy problem, and I doubt there will ever be a solution that will help 100% of the handicapped people of the world 100% of the time, and all for a reasonably price they all can afford. But I'd assume you solve the problem the same way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.