Adaptive and Assistive Technology

In Janet Hopkins' article School Library Accessibility: The Role of Assistive Technology (Hopkins, Janet. “School Library Accessibility: The Role of Assistive Technology.” Teacher Librarian, 31:3, February, 2004.) she offers ten ideas to aid Library Teachers in making their own school libraries more accessible to students with disabilities. To save blog space, I have included these in the adjacent image instead of copy-&-pasting them all.

What are my thoughts on them? To start, I think ideas 1, 2, and 6 are excellent and highly advisable. I think 3 is too general, as "barriers to learning" can be and mean anything to any number of people depending on the issues that impact. Some students simply have learning differences or are so far behind academically as to amount to accessibility problems, yet no assistive technology is required. For example, there are some students in the 6th Grade school I work at whose reading level is at 2nd grade. You would never know it speaking to them (or at least I did not), and assistive technology in the traditional sense of the term is little help because what they need are simply books at their level. Beyond that, I think idea 8 is good provided the need is great enough, yet the the rest of the ideas I deem as more aspirational than practical.

Which brings up a key point, for one notices that Hopkins' article is a decade old. Much has changed these last ten years, little more so – and so drastically – as technology. Now every student has a smartphone and many schools, including my own, provided chromebook laptops to the students. Not quite the same as in 2004 (when I was in elementary school). Hence I think the article shows it age a bit since these days students can get audio and basically any other type of book or reading aid swiftly, and in fact are often provided them by the school in advance, possibly before the Library Teacher is even aware of students individual needs, such as in the school I work at. In short, the 10 ideas sound pre-Digital Age, and also pre the days when a hyper focus is given to maximize accessibility. Still and again, as a general matter the ideas are worth considering and 1, 2, and 6 absolutely worth doing. By the way, everything I mentioned about what current schools do is also what my school does, and on the subject of idea 1, special educators have always come to the library first to alert us of special needs we should be aware of; though at the same time this rarely occurs since the special educators begin each year fully prepared and the role my supervisor have played in such matters has thus far been vanishingly small.