Learning never exhausts the mind.

Leonardo Da Vinci

In the recent past, addressing the needs of students with learning or physical disabilities has proven to be a real challenge for teachers at all levels of education. However, recent improvements in technology have attempted to solve these issues with a variety of tools screen readers, voice to text programs, and texts with audio recordings. Moreover, here is a correlation between an increase in learning when accessibility tools are utilised by teachers (Mahoney & Hall, 2017).

Despite these advances in accommodating tools for these students, many teachers fail to adequately employ and adjust their course content to enables these students to flourish academically (Taylor, 2016). Sadly, most Upper Schools and Institutions of Higher Education are still assigning readings within the PDF format. The issue with PDF is that many screen readers are unable to read the poorly scanned documents. An alternative to the PDF is a digital file posted with standalone links to a web page (Taylor, 2016).

Furthermore, a significant number of schools do not have a dedicated IT technician on the school grounds or, as is more likely, the school has a staff member who knows enough to be dangerous. Schools ought to budget appropriately in order to have a part-time IT technician on the staff to handle the issue as they arise, instead of waiting multiple days for the district IT person to find the time to fix the issues. Perhaps the funding to resolve these pressing issues ought to be found in reducing the exurbanite salaries of questionably competent administrators; just a thought…

In the meantime, the best practice is to make your content as widely accessible by utilising the various technological tools that enable screen readers to function. In addition, if a teacher feels comfortable, lectures should be recorded and/or filmed at some point to allow students the opportunity for review at home in case a student is absent or has a traumatic brain injury.

To combat a sharp increase in students with learning disabilities (Zablotsky, et al., 2019) teachers must learn to present their lectures or activities in multiple forms of media. Lessons conducted PowerPoint with embedded images, readings on PDF, recordings, and, videos should be easily read by screen-reading programs and have closed caption capability.

Lastly, when allocating reading teachers should consider books that already have audio recordings on YouTube or Audible. For those intrepid teachers, one can always record the text yourself and make it available to the students. The caveat to a personal recording is that the teacher should check with the publisher/author before attempting a personal recording. With that said, if the recording is for educational purposes, then the majority of publishers/authors will usually grant permission to record the content.

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I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Leonardo Da Vinci

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References

Mahoney, J., & Hall, C. (2017). Using Technology to Differentiate and Accommodate Students with Disabilities. E-Learning and Digital Media, 14(5), 291–303. doi: 10.1177/2042753017751517

Taylor, M. A. (2016, January 26). Improving Accessibility for Students with Visual Disabilities in the Technology-Rich Classroom: PS: Political Science & Politics. Retrieved January 23, 2020, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/improving-accessibility-for-students-with-visual-disabilities-in-the-technologyrich classroom/AF0FDD6C66982C17ABCC214B14321B38 

Zablotsky, B., Black , L. I., Maenner , M. J., Schieve , L. A., Danielson , M. L., Bitsko , R. H., … Boyle , C. A. (2019, September 26). Increase in Developmental Disabilities Among Children in the United States. Retrieved January 28, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/developmentaldisabilities/features/increase-in-developmental-disabilities.html

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