MIT Students Hack Disability Solutions

According to the World Health Association, more than a billion people worldwide need one or more assistive devices to address physical, communication, or other disabilities. However, about 90% of them lack access to such technologies.

To raise awareness of the situation, jump-start innovation, and encourage students to consider careers developing assistive devices, the Assistive Technology Hackathon (ATHack) brings together teams of MIT students every year to brainstorm, design, and create solutions for problems faced by specific disabled “clients” from the Boston/Cambridge community.

The event is interdisciplinary and open to anyone. ATHack coordinators asemble teams of students with complementary skills, interests, and academic backgrounds. Clients often act as co-designers and meet with their teams at a dinner a couple weeks ahead of the hackathon to lay out the particular problem they need solved.

On the day of the event, the teams have 11 hours to produce their solution, from start to finish. It’s understood by all involved that the result may not be an immediately usable prototype, but development can continue beyond the event with some help and resources from the organizers.

Of this year’s 15 projects, eight or nine were completed by the deadline. Among the winners selected were a portable seat to allow someone to use a shower while traveling and an armband that vibrates to alert a hearing-impaired wearer when someone rings their doorbell.

More than 300 participants have collaborated on 70-plus projects since ATHack was launched five years ago. Its organizers hope to post a compilation database of hackathon projects within the next few months.

New Standards Rate E-Books’ Accessibility

Benetech, a nonprofit social enterprise that focuses on scalable technology solutions to improve accessibility and human rights, has rolled out a third-party verification program that lets schools and colleges determine how well e-textbooks meet the needs of visually impaired or dyslexic students or those with other print disabilities.

Called Global Certified Accessible (GCA), the program was developed in conjunction with the U.K.’s Royal Institute for the Blind, Vision Australia, and Dedicon, a Dutch creator of accessibility products and services, and underwent a six-month pilot. GCA is a standardized ratings system for evaluating digital titles based on more than 100 accessibility features. It can be used by publishers as well as school districts and higher-ed institutions, and recommends remediation where content falls short of its standards.

“We find that files improve significantly after first-round reviews and that subsequent files reflect the insights gained from our feedback,” said a Benetech release.

Accessibility is a key issue for schools, both to serve students better and to avoid legal action for falling short. A Blackboard study earlier this year indicated that the average overall accessibility score for college and university campuses hasn’t improved greatly over the past five years, inching up from 27.5% to just 30.6%.

On the publishing side, Ingram Content Group will incorporate GCA into its VitalSource and CoreSource platforms. Elsevier, HarperCollins, Harvard Business Publishing, Macmillan Learning, and Penguin Random House are among GCA’s other early supporters, although the system is now open to all publishers.

“Every publisher should strive to make their content as accessible as possible,” Denis Saulnier, managing director of product design and delivery, higher education, for Harvard Business Publishing, said in a Benetech blog post. “The first step is getting an accurate snapshot of compliance. Benetech’s process is invaluable in identifying areas of improvement and helping to prioritize work.”

Disability Focus Shifts to Digital Barriers

While it’s now routine for higher-education institutions to provide physical accommodations to ensure disabled access, such as ramps and automatic doors, new barriers are being found in digital course materials, websites, and learning platforms, leading to lawsuits brought by disability groups and remedial actions ordered by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Advocacy groups are working to ensure that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and similar antidiscrimination laws are interpreted to apply to learning technologies that didn’t exist when the law was signed more than a quarter century ago. They’re also hoping for movement on proposed new DOJ rules governing how all public entities, including public colleges and universities, offer their services online.

The University of California, Berkeley, was found in violation of the ADA because much of its free audio and video content posted online lacked captions that would make it accessible to deaf students. Last month, Miami University, Oxford, OH, agreed to retool its accessibility policies as part of a settlement with a blind student who’d sued over inaccessible course materials and a lack of trained assistants.

Those and similar cases exemplify what the National Federation of the Blind characterizes as a school-by-school approach to protecting students with disabilities from being left behind by the digitization of higher ed.

Beware of Technology Addiction

Technology has become a driving force for most people, but, just like anything else, too much of a good thing can be too much. Technology can become addictive, and that can starts as early as infancy.

Kids now grow up in a world where they play with toys that link them to the Internet and television shows that encourage live tweeting. The increase in screen time boosts the chance that children may suffer from low self-esteem and relationship problems, which follow them through their teenage years and into adulthood, according to a report in InformationWeek.

Social awkwardness can be the least of the concerns for adults who develop symptoms from excessive digital dependence. They also suffer from insomnia, short-term memory and hearing loss, eye irritation, and spinal damage.

“There are plenty of ways to minimize your risk of digital overload,” wrote Kelly Sheridan. “Start by monitoring your smartphone use. An hour before bed, leave you phone in the kitchen to charge instead of putting it on your bedside table overnight. If you have a desk job, set a timer every 20 minutes so you know when to stand and stretch you legs. Alter the volume limit on your iPod, which lets you adjust the maximum level of sound emitted from the earbuds. And finally, walk past the couch when you get home, put on a pair of sneakers, and go for a stroll. Your body will thank you for it.”

Workshop Promotes Disability Awareness

Accessibility: It Is Important is a free online workshop from Atomic Learning in support of National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which takes place in October.

The focus of the workshop is the basics of accessibility and using accessible learning materials. It also covers how to check materials for accessibility, creating material, how to caption movies, understanding different disabilities, and legal and ethical requirements for the learning materials.

The workshop is available through Dec. 15. 

Gaze-Based Technology Is Coming

Gaze-based technology has been around for years, but it could on the shelves sooner than you might imagine. A Danish firm, The Eye Tribe, has for about a year been trying to develop mobile devices that people can control with their eyes.

“You have infrared light that is projected toward your face,” Sune Alstrup Johansen, usability expert of the Gaze Group at the IT University of Copenhagen, explained in a National Public Radio report. “And the infrared light is then reflected in your pupil. And by seeing those reflections we can pretty easily—well, not easily—with our algorithms, we can easily calculate where you’re looking.”

The Eye Tribe has even created a variation on the gaming app Fruit Ninja, in which the user slices flying fruit with his eyes instead of a swipe of the touchscreen.

Accessibility Still Lacking to NFB

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has accused Educause and Internet2 of ignoring the needs of print-disabled students in e-book pilots in progress on more than 20 campuses across the country this fall. The criticism caught the pilot developers by surprise since they thought they were collaborating with the NFB on the project.

The criticism was leveled, in part, because a review of the original pilot done by Disability Services at the University of Minnesota recommended the school drop out of the program because of its use of PDF formats that wouldn’t work with adaptive technology such as text-to-voice software.

“The initial problem was the way the content is packaged and delivered, but it really [goes] beyond that, to the affordances that are built into the package as well,” said Brad Cohen, associate chief information officer for academic technology at the University of Minnesota.

The NFB criticism is an attempt to pressure organizers to add accessibility requirements into any platform used to deliver e-books, according to NFB President Marc Maurer, who added he would be satisfied to know what accessibility plans will be going forward.

“There has to be a deadline by which time they expect the system to be accessible to blind professors and students,” he said. “It can’t be 25 years from now. A couple of years would suit me. I’d be glad to have it sooner than that.”

Educause and Internet2 claimed in an e-mail to Campus Technology, “Given the rapid change in how technology is deployed—students often bring it rather than campuses providing it—it is critical to experiment with new ways to provide course materials. Inevitably, some of those experiments fall short. However, rejecting experimentation does not solve the problem.”

The tiff could be an opportunity for publishers to become more involved. Mickey Levitan, CEO of Courseload, which provides an e-reading platform for the pilot, said he believes accessibility is a “shared interest” between tech firms and publishers.

“These are very complex issues that will have to be resolved with collaboration of all the key parties,” he said. “I don’t think that this is going to fall unduly on any one of those groups, but its clear that its going to have to be a collaborative multipronged effort if we’re going to make progress possible.”

Education Tech Can't Leave Disabled Students Behind

The Department of Education estimates 11% of new college freshmen will arrive on campus with some sort of disability. That’s become a huge issue as institutions try to keep pace with technological changes while providing accessibility to all its students, whether they have vision or hearing problems to learning and cognitive disabilities.

State and federal legislators have stepped up with laws and regulations to provide equal access, and the industry is making progress. Blackboard claims its products meet industry standards and must gain approval from people with disabilities through partnerships with organizations such as the National Federation for the Blind before they ever reach the market.

But laws often have no teeth, according to Dianne Hengst, director of disability services at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a recent article that appeared at mysanantonio.com. Not only that, Hengst has also found students with disabilities do not always register with her office.

“(People with disabilities) don’t want to be segregated,” said Marti Hathorn, a blind graduate of UTSA and assistive technology supervisor at the San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. “We don’t want our own computer lab. I didn’t want to be left out of anything or cut corners. I wasn’t (in school) to get by, I wanted to do better than everyone else.”

Assistive technology could be as simple as curbs with handicap ramps and speech recognition software to more controversial ideas such as cochlear implants for children. For Hathorn, it included a screen magnifier, a closed-circuit television, and a scanner for her textbooks.

“When computer usage first took off, accessibility wasn’t even brought to the table,” she said. “Now it is starting to be a priority and is part of the discussion and more people with disabilities are speaking up.”

iPads assist disabled users

Here is an inspiring story and video from The New York Times about a boy with a degenerative disease that has been able to interact with an iPad. His mother says it is the first device that they have had success with and it is far cheaper than other devices they have tried. In addition, because the apps are inexpensive they can experiment to see which ones are the most beneficial.

The article notes that there are studies in progress to determine how effective the iPad is for people with disabilities. In the months since the iPad has been on the market, it has already become a popular device for assisting the disabled but the usefulness of the device depends on the specific disability. In the coming months, we can expect that additional apps will be created and added to the app store to assist disabled users.

Using e-readers to assist students with reading disabilities

A recent Education Week article discusses how e-readers may be able to help students with dyslexia and reading disabilities. To date, there is not much research to confirm that e-readers can improve reading skills but the devices are still evolving and many educators believe that there is true potential. Some of the benefits that e-readers on the market today can provide are: text-to-speech functionality, the ability to change the size of the type, and a built-in dictionary that can help students look up words and pronunciations. In addition, children may feel more comfortable using the devices in front of their peers because e-readers were not specifically designed for students with disabilities, students may need less assistance from teachers and parents, and the devices could help reduce the time it takes for students to receive the content they need in the format that they require.

Along with these benefits, there are additional capabilities that could be added to e-readers to make the devices more powerful. David H. Rose, the founder and chief education officer for the Center for Applied Special Technology, says, for now it is imperative to bring together the manufacturers of e-readers, as well as educators, policymakers, and experts in educational technology, to determine what features e-readers could and should include.

Lotta Larson, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at Kansas State University, pointed out that professional development will also be required. "I don't think the e-reader in itself is going to make a difference, but if it's used with effective instruction, then it can make a huge difference.”

As the devices evolve and more experiments are implemented, we can expect that additional research will be conducted to determine if e-readers can improve reading skills and assist those with reading disabilities.

e-reader accessibility

Recently Ars Technica compared the Kindle, the iPad, the Sony Reader, and the Nook to find out which device had the best accessibility features. Their research showed that the iPad and the Kindle are farthest ahead but there is still room for improvement. While all of the e-readers allow users to increase the font size, only the iPad and the Kindle include text-to-speech functionality. In addition, only the iPad and the latest version of the Kindle, the Kindle 3, include audible menus.

In a recent press release, the National Federation of the Blind praised Amazon for making the Kindle 3 accessible.

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: "We commend Amazon on the unveiling of a new Kindle that blind and print-disabled people can use. In order to compete in today's digital society, blind and print-disabled people must be able to access the same reading technologies as the sighted. The National Federation of the Blind has long been urging Amazon to make its reading device accessible, and we are pleased that our efforts have come to fruition."

Internet Archive to make more books available to the blind and visually impaired

A recent article from the Associated Press, says that the Internet Archive has announced a new service to make more books available to the blind and visually impaired. The organization has hired hundreds of people to scan a variety of books into its digital database so that the books can be read by the devices used to convert text to speech. It is expected that one million books will be available initially which will more than double the titles available today. According to Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, currently only about five percent of published books are available in a digital form that is accessible to the visually impaired and there are even fewer books produced in Braille.

In the press release, Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, commented on the exciting news, “Every person deserves the opportunity to enhance their lives through access to the books that teach, entertain and inspire. Bringing access to huge libraries of books to the blind and print disabled is truly one of benefits of the digital revolution.”

Individuals, organizations, libraries, and publishers can donate books to the effort via this link.

Flat World Knowledge announces partnership with Bookshare

In recent months, open access course materials and textbook accessibility have been two important topics in the news and now two companies are joining forces to make open textbooks available to students with print disabilities. Earlier this week, Flat World Knowledge announced a partnership with Bookshare, the largest free online library for people with print disabilities. Bookshare currently has agreements with many trade publishers but Flat World will be the first publisher of higher education materials to supply digital textbooks to the organization.

According to the press release, Flat World will provide Bookshare with XML files so that the files can be converted to DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) and Braille formats. Students will be able to access the texts in multiple formats directly from Bookshare’s website which will eliminate the conversion efforts required by individual campuses for those specific titles. Students will also be able to access the texts when the semester begins rather than waiting weeks for the titles to be converted. According to the agreement, eleven business and economics textbooks will be available initially and within the next two years, an additional fifty titles in several subjects will be added.

Amazon to add new features to the Kindle for blind and vision impaired users

On Monday, Amazon announced some good news for blind and vision impaired Kindle users. According to the news release, in the summer of 2010, Amazon will add two new features to the Kindle to make it more useful. The first addition is a font size that is twice the height and width of the current largest font size. The second addition is an audible menu system. The device already features text-to-speech technology but the lack of audible menus makes it difficult for blind users to navigate to the books without assistance. Earlier this year, the National Federation of the Blind urged Amazon to add this feature to the device and in November, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University announced that they would not buy any more Kindle devices until the devices were truly accessible to the blind.

In other Amazon news, Jeff Bezos recently provided some interesting numbers in a New York Times interview. When asked about the percentage of digital books sold, Bezos said, “For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It’s astonishing.” Bezos also commented on how quickly paper books are migrating to their digital equivalents. “When we launched Kindle two years ago, it was 90,000 titles, and today it’s more than 350,000. We’re adding thousands of titles every week.”

Intel introduces e-reader for the blind and visually impaired

Earlier this week, Intel introduced an e-reader that is designed specifically for the blind and visually impaired. The device can read digital books aloud as well as convert printed material to digital form so that it can be magnified or read aloud. Users convert the print material by taking a picture of it with the built-in camera. Additionally, the menus on the device have audio capability so that blind users can operate the device on their own. This is an important feature because the current Kindle DX device has text-to-speech technology but does not feature audio menus so blind users can not navigate to the books.

Intel has also created a capture station device to be used with the e-reader to capture the images of entire books. A video demonstration of the e-reader and capture station can be viewed on Intel’s website.

According to an article from VentureBeat, several organizations have endorsed the e-reader including: National Center for Learning Disabilities, the International Dyslexia Association, the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs, the Council for Exceptional Children, and the National Federation of the Blind.

Update on the AccessText Network

As mentioned in a previous posting, the AccessText Network is working to make it easier for colleges and universities to provide course materials to students with disabilities. The initiative consists of an online database that aggregates publisher information to allow institutions to order electronic versions of the content or gain permission to scan course materials.

According to a recent article from eSchool News, the service is currently in beta testing and will officially launch in July 2010 but already more than 650 colleges and universities have enrolled. The article reports that with the system, orders can be fulfilled in about four days and already 3,000 requests have been fulfilled since August. Without AccessText, it can take weeks or months for students with disabilities to receive their textbooks. In addition, members of the network are able to access the publishers that produce 92 percent of the college textbooks on the market.

Mike Shuttic, president of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), commented that AccessText Network is "a significant step forward that combines stakeholder resources and addresses the rights of students with disabilities. I encourage every member of the disability community to coalesce around this solution, ensuring its success."

AccessText initiative to improve textbook accessibility for disabled students

Several months ago, we discussed a new initiative known as AccessText Network that will soon make it easier for colleges to provide course materials to students with disabilities. The initiative was developed by the Association of American Publishers and the Alternative Media Access Center, and is funded by several publishes including: Pearson Education; Bedford, Freeman & Worth, Wiley; McGraw-Hill Higher Education; Cengage Learning; CQ Press; Reed Elsevier; John Wiley & Sons; and W.W. Norton. The initiative will help improve access and reduce cost of textbooks for disabled students because it will aggregate publisher information and allow students to order the content in the format that meets their needs.

According to a recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the service is now in beta testing at 367 offices and expected to launch in July 2010. Dawn V. Adams, digital-media-accessibility specialist at the Alternative Media Access Center at the University of Georgia and participant in the beta testing, has found the service useful because she has been able to get the required books easier and it is streamlining her work. When the service officially launches next year, it is hoped that colleges will be able to share materials that are not available in electronic format to reduce duplicating the scanning efforts across campuses.

National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind file lawsuit against ASU over Kindle DX

Last week, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) filed a lawsuit against Arizona State University to prevent the university from issuing Kindle DX devices for the textbook pilot. The lawsuit says that the Kindle DX device features text-to-speech technology to read books aloud but the menus do not work in the same way so blind students will not be able to select a book and activate the feature. A blind student from ASU has been named as a plaintiff in the action and the NFB and ACB have also asked the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to investigate the other universities involved in the pilot – Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College.

In an article from Inside Higher Ed, Chris Danielson, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind says that the software to make the menus accessible to the blind does exist but it has not been added to the Kindle DX . If the universities adopt the Kindle DX devices as is, they are violating the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Virgil Renzulli, a spokesman for Arizona State commented that they are “committed to equal access for all students” and the university’s disability resource center will provide “the necessary tools so that all students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their academic pursuits.” Amazon has not commented on the lawsuit.

Bookshare partners with publishers and universities to make more books available to students with disabilities

Last week, Bookshare, a nonprofit company that makes books available to people with visual disabilities announced that they will be partnering with leading U.S. trade publishers, K-12 publishers, and 11 universities to make more books available to students. Contributions from publishers will include digital trade and textbooks, while the universities will provide access to the books that they scanned and formatted for students. Universities are able to scan the books because of an exemption to the U.S. copyright law which makes it legal for books to be scanned for those that have print disabilities. In the past, many scanning efforts have been duplicated across universities but with the new partnership all of the scanned and digital books will be available for access via the Bookshare online library. Bookshare will also handle the conversion of the digital files into accessible formats such as DAISY 3.0 (Digital Accessible Information System) and BRF (Braille Ready File). Bookshare’s library collection currently includes over 46,000 titles and is expected to increase to over 100,000 books by 2012.

In regards to working with the publishers to obtain the digital version of the books, Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, the nonprofit organization that operates Bookshare commented, “Digital media is the future for learners and individuals with print disabilities. Fewer than five percent of books are available in accessible formats today. Working directly with book publishers, we have an extraordinary opportunity to knock down the barriers and raise the floor of access to ensure all individuals have access to print publications at the same time.”

Textbook Accessibility for Disabled Students

A posting in yesterday's Wired Campus discussed an interesting new initiative to make it easier for institutions to meet the different format needs of students with disabilities: the AccessText Network. The network will be a clearinghouse of content created by the Association of American Publishers and the Alternative Media Access Center, part of the University System of Georgia. The idea is to "facilitate and support the nationwide delivery of alternative files for students with diagnosed print-related disabilities." AccessText will be a conduit for information about what is available and in what formats and allow students to order the content in the format that meets their needs. This initiative should help reduce the cost of textbooks for disabled students and institutions, while improving access.

Other resources on digitized books for the disable include a blog posting from last year that mentions Gooogle's efforts to make Google Books more accessible. That posting is based on an article from about the same time that discusses some of the issues and opportunities associated with technology and students with visual impairment.

Finally, check out Bookshare.org which offers books for free in different formats for the disabled. Their site also has other information on this topic.

There may be opportunities for college stores to work with some of these initiatives and reduce the costs to institutions for providing the materials to students.