Accessibility

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Accessibility for All

As a special education teacher this is something that is important to me. Students who have disabilities should be provided with the opportunity to be just as successful as their non disabled peers. For many of these students, they benefit from, accomodations, modifications, and assistive technology to help them reach their full potential. 

Going back to my college days, I took a class on assistive technology. The majority of this class focused on assistive technology that would help support students who had significant disabilities. I remember learning a lot about switches, picture communication boards, and augmented communication devices. These pieces are important for a percentage of students, but many students do not need that intensive level of assistive technology to gain accessibility to the classroom and their daily activities.

Check out the image below that outlines some additional examples of assistive technology that can help improve student accessibility.

Image Source: portal.ct.gov

Google Tools for Special Needs

I chose to take a closer look at the article Google Tools for Special Needs by Eric Curts since the students that I work with are Chromebook users. I really enjoyed that Eric broke down his list into different categories. Doing this, allows people searching for accessibility tools in specific areas to find them easily. 

The population of students that I work with have learning disabilities in the areas of Math and/or Reading. Some of these features are familiar to me, but others are brand new. Some of the extensions that we have utilized at my school are SpeakIt! and SpeechPad. These extensions help support students with speech to text and text to speech needs. One of the websites that I have used personally is Newsela. I enjoy this website because it allows me to differentiate the reading level of the news articles in order to promote my students' comprehension. 

Eric Curtis also outlines Chrome, Gmail, and YouTube features in his article. Many of these are shortcuts can be used with diverse learner. I find some of these to be useful for my students, but also for myself as an educator. 

Chromebook Accessibility Features

Below are some accessibility features that Google has available on their Chromebooks. These are great for supporting our diverse learners! Check out this website to learn more about them and other features.


Comments

  1. Jill.ian.KayOctober 7, 2021 at 4:07 PM

    Hi Katie!
    How cool is it that you were offered a class to learn all about assistive technologies in the classroom! I would have love to have taken something like that. I am going to have to check out the extensions you talked about using and keep them as a resource just in case I could use them for one of my students, thanks for sharing! - Jillian

    ReplyDelete
  2. NMZumpanoOctober 8, 2021 at 3:51 PM

    Your infographic is fantastic!

    ReplyDelete

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