Assistive Technology Cont'd

Today, I had a chance to experience first-hand the hardships of an individual with visual disabilities by trying to send an email to my professor with the computer monitor turned off. WOW. It was extremely difficult, and I would not have been able to do it without having partially memorized the steps that lead me to my email page, etc. Assistive Technologies provided me with a means to do this, however without practice its near impossible, with the implementation of a program that reads all of the text that is on a given page aloud. The screen-reading program can read webpages, word documents, desktops, virtually anything that pops up on a computer screen. There are various programs that can do this, but the two largest programs are JAWS and Kurzwell. The programs are not cheap, but in many cases funding can be provided through a number of different ways. I find it a very hard category to investigate, because everything is so interesting to me as a prospective special education teacher, everything is so inventive and in many ways more creative that any Da Vinci construction.