Supporting Accessibility for Advanced Technological Education

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Mobile Apps for Accessibility

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It’s very rare nowadays to be far from a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device, and we use them for just about everything – staying in touch with others, taking photos and notes, looking up directions, checking the hours of operation of our favorite restaurants, playing games, and catching up on social media, to name just a few. One of the biggest bolsters to the mobile device experience is applications (apps), which can add features or enhance existing ones. This goes for accessibility, too! Here, we’ve gathered a list of some mobile apps that make the day-to-day world more accessible by providing valuable assistance to people with disabilities, many of which may be helpful for your disabled students and/or employees (and maybe even you, too). All of the apps below are free, though some offer additional in-app purchases.

Envision

Envision is an app for iOS and Android is designed for those who are blind or visually impaired. It’s a straightforward app that uses a smartphone or tablet’s camera to articulate visual information to speech. But it’s not just limited to text – it can read handwriting and even recognize different objects. Envision is broken out into three main...

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Tools

This 14-page report, published by the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes, provides an analysis of the characteristics of deaf people who applied for Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) services. VR services are designed to assist individuals with disabilities in pursuing employment, providing resources such as career counseling and...
This 52-page study from Oregon State University, provided by 3Play Media, offers an overview of college students' awareness of and engagement with closed captioning and transcripts, examining reasons for their usage and the benefits associated with them. According to the survey results, 70% of students use closed captioning at least some of the...
This resource from the TIES Center provides a roadmap for quality inclusive education programs for students with cognitive disabilities. Information on equity, civil rights, and research lenses; core values and outcomes; science foundations; supportive leadership; and other areas accompany this roadmap. The roadmap is broken down into the following...
In this video from DO-IT, undergraduate students with disabilities share their research experiences and offer guidance to faculty about how they can mentor students with disabilities in research. The work done by AccessComputing to facilitate these experiences is also highlighted. The video recording runs 3:29 minutes in length.
This resource from the TIES Center provides a tool that helps educators make instruction more inclusive for all, especially students with cognitive disabilities. The 5-15-45 tool provides three different timeframes to collaboratively plan for instruction both in-person and remotely. In the 5 minutes timeframe, educators identify the most important...