Technology Supports for Students with Learning Disabilities

By John Lubert, Strategic Technology Planner, Provincial Schools Branch

A grade ten student walks into the computer lab and sits down at a computer station with her English assignment. She takes her novel and inserts it into a scanner, presses a button and puts on her headset with microphone. The words of the novel appear on the monitor, and the student clicks the mouse. The computer begins to read the novel, highlighting each word on the screen as it moves from left to right. The student clicks the mouse again and begins to dictate the answer to one of the homework questions. A "sticky note" with her answer appears on the screen. She hesitates, trying to find just the right word. She clicks the mouse again and suggested words appear on the screen and are read to her. She picks the one she likes best. Forty minutes later, she saves her work to disk, and leaves the lab with her homework completed, knowing it has been checked for grammar and spelling.

This is not on the Starship Enterprise. It is in Cathy Paul's Demonstration School in London Ontario. Cathy has been integrating text-to-speech, speech-to-text, word prediction, and organizational software into the school programs of students with severe learning disabilities with great success since 1997.

In the early grades, children in school learn to read. After about grade four, the structure of our school system expects them to read to learn. Children with reading difficulties will begin to experience program gaps as the pace of the learning increases.

Computer technology can help students with learning disabilities keep up with the content while good teaching continues to address the skill deficits that hamper the child's reading and writing

The software programs that assist the students at Amethyst to compensate for their reading and writing deficits are grouped under the heading of Adaptive Technology (AT). AT are compensatory tools that allow students with learning disabilities to perform tasks on the computer that they ordinarily have difficulty with, typically reading and writing. Adaptive Technology circumvents decoding and encoding so that students are able to work in content areas without struggling with the reading and writing in those subjects.

AT for students with learning disabilities often refers to either text-to-speech or speech-to-text programs.

Text-to-speech programs work in combination with scanning equipment to scan print material into the computer using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that enables the computer to recognize the millions of different combinations of type fonts and sizes as distinct letters. The text-to-speech software can then read the words as sentences that students with severe learning disabilities can understand as speech. In the better text-to-speech software, students can control the type of voice, the speed, pitch, and volume. They can have a word repeated, or spelled letter by letter. Highlighting can be by the word or by the paragraph.

Speech-to-text programs, sometimes called speech recognition programs, take spoken words and translate them into text or actions. As the program "learns" how the user speaks, recognition improves. For students who have difficulty with written production, students for whom other methods of completing written work have been unsuccessful, or students whose oral skills are better than handwritten and keyboarding skills, speech recognition can be an effective tool.

A significant obstacle to the implementation of appropriate AT with students who have learning disabilities is a lack of awareness and training. Education must occur at a number of different levels:

• First, we need awareness. Many students, parents and teachers simply do not know that this technology exists, and that it can work.
  
• Second, we need professional development for the educational community to learn how to determine which children can benefit from AT, and prescribe the best programs for each child. They need support in accessing funding for AT through vehicles like the ISA programs.
  
• Third, teachers need training in how to use the software, how to teach students with learning disabilities to use it effectively, and how to integrate AT into the curriculum so that increased student learning occurs.

One board on the right track is the Durham District School Board, who have a learning disabilities facilitator, Gail Ivanco, who is an experienced advocate for AT. Gail is in constant demand as a speaker and presenter, as well as assisting her colleagues in understanding AT and how to appropriately and effectively implement these learning supports for students with learning disabilities.

For more information on AT, go to the Special Needs Opportunity Windows website (SNOW) at http://snow.utoronto.ca

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