NCTI Technology Innovators Conference

Recently Lucy Gray and I were invited to the 2007 NCTI Technology Innovators Conference. The focus of this conference is building solutions to make technology and information more accessible, especially for young people with disabilities. Check out this slideshow of the conference highlights!

An important part of this conference is connecting researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and policy makers. It was inspiring to hear from innovators and social entrepreneurs like Jim Fruchterman from the nonprofit technology company, Benetech. Recently, Benetech was selected by the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education to provide access for every student with a print disability in the United States via Bookshare.org. Lucy spoke on a panel with Jim and Chuck Hitchcock from CAST on NIMAS legislation, an significant law that guides the production and electronic distribution of digital versions of textbooks and other instructional materials so they can be more easily converted into accessible formats. Lucy's main question was: Why can't services like Bookshare be made available to allow all students access to digital textbooks?

In his recent ITM post Steve Hargadon encouraged the use of open source to create exciting collaborations and provide solutions. So, at the NCTI conference, it was exciting to meet developers who shared open source assistive technology initiatives that offer free tools. This included Steve Jacobs from the IDEAL Group. Steve shared about his colleague Charles Chen (a Google technologist) who developed Fire Vox.

Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser, essentially a screen reader designed especially for Firefox. In addition to the basic features, such as providing navigation assistance that are expected of screen readers, Fire Vox provides support for MathML and CSS speech module properties. Imagine how students would benefit to have dense text read aloud to them! Steve Jacobs and his colleagues (including Chen) have also repackaged Fire Vox so that it (and other open source applications) can run off of a standard, portable flash drive equipped with a fully-accessible talking menu. I spoke with Steve, and if you want to learn more about portable open source assistive technology, take a look at his NCTI presentation and/or contact him directly. (Talking about making applications accessible - check out the features of the new Google Toolbar (5) which supports applets used by assistive technologies like screen readers etc. and enables keyboard navigation and access. )

An underlying theme of the conference this year was ensuring that the “participatory culture” of social networking also includes young people with disabilities. For example, there was a session titled “Second Life for Students With Special Needs.” Topics during this session included how 3D environments such as Second Life can be made accessible for people with other disabilities such as low vision. Everett Harper, director of community initiatives at Linden Lab, also mentioned Brigadoon Island, an area in Second Life devoted to people with Asperger's syndrome (for more info on Second Life, check out a February 2007 ITM blog post, where I highlighted Amanda Baggs, an adult with autism who participates in Second Life.)

Conference face to face sharing was done via various theme events. One such event was the Innovations Marketplace which allowed innovators to share ideas with venture capitalists and grant makers gave presentations. At the Techology Expo an opportunity was provided for key leaders in assistive and learning technology to showcase their work. This year's Peer Awards for the Brightest Idea was given to SMART Brain Technology. Smart Brain Home System uses technology to improve the behaviors of individuals with autism, language disorders and attention deficits. The equipment is being tested through an NCTI grant with adolescents with ADD. The large picture posted here shows Domenic Greco of "Smart Brain Home System", with Julie Duffield of WestEd at the Technology Expo. Julie is pictured about to wear a visor with sensors attached to a Sony PlayStation. This device tracked her brain activity and gave neurofeedback on her attention levels while playing a racing game.

To keep important discussions like this going after the conference, the folks at NCTI have issued a brief titled “Using the Power of Social Media to Promote Assistive and Learning Technologies ” and invite all of us to give our input to this document. These issues and people at this conference provided much food for thought about diversity, access and innovation. View the NCTI conference sessions materials to learn more.

Also if you want to find out more information or resources related to this event please feel free to contact - Julie &/or Lucy.

Giving Voice – In her own “words”

The other day I was watching old-fashioned media (CNN on the TV) when I heard this story --Living with autism in a world made for others.

I'm always looking for ways that tools, including technology, can support the learning experiences of diverse learners so this story got my attention as well as questioned my assumptions.

It highlighted how Amanda Baggs,an adult with autism, is able to communicate using a computer or a voice synthesizer. She also produces videos and posts them on the Internet. In fact, it was one of her videos titled "My Language” on YouTube that caught the attention of CNN.

Amanda’s comments in the interview, “If they see me write they don’t think I’m autistic”. The reporter picked up on this and shared how interesting it felt talking to her online persona versus meeting to her in real life. A sample video of his face to face interview is available.

The story profiled how Amanda uses the Internet to interact and meet other liked-minded people. This includes going to Second Life, a online society within a 3D world, where users can explore, build, socialize, and participate in their own economy, where she has created her own animated avatar to interact in this virtual world – a world that frees her of the energy required to navigate the complexity of the real world where body language, action, and noise play a big role.

Janet Cole, the Executive Producer of the documentary Freedommachines recently shared, “technology has evolved to be an equalizing force, we have to step back and look at what is really disabled. If people have access to the tools that can enable them to participate fully and independently in education, work, and community, then "disability" is not about the people, but about the systems and infrastructures that are not delivering necessary services and tools.”

Amanda’s story certainly showed the power of how technology tools can open up communication -- for all people. Her story shows how our narrow definitions and expectations can sometimes limit students. The work in our schools by those involved in assistive technology and universal design to offer all students access to the general curriculum is based on inspiring stories like Amanda's.

I invite you to hear more from Amanda and question your assumptions.

More than a jukebox

This is my first blog post ever - yes Lucy, I’m "jumping in." One of my favorite topics is how simple innovations in digital formats for information give students new options. In this post, I'll look at how digital audio can help students who struggle with traditional print, and can give all students new ways to tell their stories.

Like music, one can download spoken books, poetry and other text from the Internet. When teachers and students use tools and collaborate to play and produce spoken material, they can create a powerful learning environment.

Inclusive classrooms use text in audio form. Books on tape and CD have been popular for many years. Listening to the beginning chapters of a book can motivate readers or help them choose a book they'd want to read. Having the spoken text available can scaffold readers as they progress through the book. Narrated stories and picture books can be found on web sites like Bookhive. Librarians are using audio titles to support English learners in projects like the Earphone English project at Berkeley High in California. Also, in some places like the Grandview Library, podcasts provide digital versions of their texts.

Students can participate and share their love of literature with others by reading aloud to different audiences. There are many class projects where students work with students in another class, preferably at a younger grade level, to select books, poems, or stories to record for audio CDs and/or as a podcast.

A large-scale collaboration based on these ideas can be found at Librivox.org. Librivox is a new source of audio books, built one chapter a time by volunteers, who read public domain books out loud to make mp3 files that are cataloged on the site. Based on a wiki, it is an open facility with a voluntary quality review process, rather like wikipedia, with hopes to accumulate a good fraction of the vast public domain bookshelf.

The Librivox approach fills an important niche. While there are text-to-speech conversion programs available today, a natural voice can be a real help for long passages like book chapters. Whole chapters are ready for download, so they can be distributed to students on CDs or in mp3 players for use away from the computer. And while there are fee-based audio books, free sources are often helpful when funds are tight, or when a teacher wants to experiment with a new approach.

Librivox might have been possible earlier, but new technology (wikis, mp3 recording, etc.) has made it more practical. Best of all, it's embedded in a web site that offers a service, so busy teachers don't have to understand a lot of new technology to put it to use.