Assistive+technologies+and+internet+accessibility

=Assistive Technologies and Internet Accessibility= Dr Katie Ellis UniAccess, Student Services

The last 10 years has seen an increase in the number of students with disability attending University; at UWA this number has doubled. Assistive technologies that compensate for disability and/or allow for different styles of learning are enabling more people with disability to make and achieve academic goals (http://www.dest.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip99-6/execsum99_6.htm ).

Students at UWA use a number of assistive technologies including • Dragon – a dictation program used by people with limited use of their hands and dyslexia • Zoomtext – a magnification aid for people with limited eye sight • JAWS – no eye sight – reads everything out loud to the user • Read & write gold – a more in-depth spell checker and screen reader that highlights each word as it is read aloud enables people with dyslexia or other cognitive impairments to complete written tasks • Kurzweil is used by people who are blind, vision impaired, or who have a learning disability to access electronic or printed text through OCR and screen reading technology

These assistive technologies are allowing students with disability the opportunity to complete their studies independently where previously they would have relied on the assistance of someone else in order to complete tasks such as writing an assignment. The move to electronic modes of teaching and learning has created both opportunities and limitations to students with disability. While electronic documents on the internet as opposed to hard copy books may sound like a barrier free utopia for people with disability who use screen readers, this is not always the case as electronic doesn’t always mean accessible and the document will often need to be converted and corrected by a sighted person first.

Universal access to the internet regardless of disability was a key aspect to Tim Berner Lee’s original vision for the web yet an increasing complexity has strayed from this defining principle (http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/55) While web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and social networking sites are allowing internet users with disability an opportunity to mobilise politically and participate in social networks, research suggests these sites are largely inaccessible to the disabled user (http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/enation85).

My research in this area is looking to how digital design is triggering disability through inaccessibility when it has the potential for such great possibility for users with different types of disability (http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?curTab=DESCRIPTION&id=&parent_id=&sku=&isbn=9780415871358&pc )

Ms Katie Ellis Disability Support Worker, UniAccess Diversity and Transition Phone 6488 1801 Fax 6488 1119 MBDP M302 Email katie.ellis@uwa.edu.au