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The following was provided by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and is used with permission.
By David H. Rose, Ed.D., Co-Executive Director of CAST
Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, it is an honor to be asked to testify at this important hearing on Education and Technology. My name is David Rose and I am the co-executive director of CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology and principal investigator of the National Center for Access to the General Curriculum, an OSEP-funded cooperative agreement. I welcome the opportunity to speak with you today. The fact that I have been asked to testify on the educational technology needs of students with disabilities demonstrates that Congress understands the critical importance of education technology for all learners.
Members of this Committee were central to the passage of numerous pieces of landmark legislation over the past 30 years, including Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1988 and 1998, and the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Because of these laws, many things formerly thought to be impossible for individuals with disabilities are now commonplace.
Now, individuals with disabilities have a right to a free appropriate public school education, and can expect to find physically accessible educational buildings. Tragically, however, most curricula - the materials and methods for learning found inside these newly accessible buildings - are in fact not available or accessible to students with disabilities.
This moment in history, when innovative new educational technologies are proliferating, presents a unique and urgent opportunity to right this injustice. If we seize this opportunity, we will see people with disabilities making the contributions to our society envisioned and supported by past landmark legislation. Further, the strategic appropriation of funds at this time will result in more effective use of educational dollars and a subsequent reduction in the number of people entering SSI and SSDI programs because they are not qualified to work in the jobs of the future. Very significant benefits will accrue not only to children with disabilities, but to all children.
I will describe three key areas in educational technology significant for students with disabilities: assistive technology, digital curricula, and universal design. In each area, I offer specific recommendations for Congress.
Most current successes of technology for individuals with disabilities are examples of "adaptive" or "assistive" technologies. Assistive technologies are applications (either hardware or software) designed specifically to assist disabled individuals in overcoming barriers. Examples include:
Matthew, 3rd grader with physical disabilities who cannot speak or use his arms or legs, uses electronic switches to drive a wheelchair and operate his computer to write and communicate.
Katherine, a 6th grader who is blind, uses screen reader technologies to navigate the Internet and do her social studies homework.
Nina, who has a brain injury that causes her to be aphasic, uses an electronic augmentative communication device to speak to her friends and collaborate on schoolwork.
Even more spectacular assistive technologies are under development, including devices that can be implanted in the brain for hearing, for vision, for control of paralyzed muscles. These essential uses of technology for individuals with disabilities will require sustained federal support. There is simply not enough profit in developing for these "low incidence" students to attract the investments of the private sector.
That recommendation notwithstanding, it is dangerous to view assistive technology as the sole focus of educational technology for students with disabilities. Such an orientation places the emphasis of intervention on the individual rather than the learning environment. Developing powerful technologies to overcome barriers must be balanced by designing environments with fewer barriers. The lesson of the ADA is that small affordances built in everywhere, like curb cuts and ramps, are as critical for access as are assistive technologies like motorized wheelchairs.
The same is true for educational materials and methods. We need to use the new technologies not only to overcome existing learning barriers but also to design learning environments with fewer barriers right from the start.
In the Concord, New Hampshire public schools, teachers and parents are engaged in the painstaking task of digitizing much of their printed curricular materials into the computer. They are working to create "digital versions" of the printed materials used in their schools. Why are they going to all this trouble?
They are doing this work because digital versions of the books are much better for students with disabilities. The difference is not in the content - the digital versions have exactly the same content. The difference is in the way that content is displayed.
In print versions the content is permanently on paper. Its display is fixed, unchangeable, "one size fits all." In digital versions, content is presented dynamically by the computer. As a result, content can be displayed in many different ways, adjusting to many different learners.
Imagine, for example, a digital version of "To Kill a Mockingbird" for a 10th grade classroom:
Sarah, a student with low vision, can display the text in a very large font so she can see it.
Bill, a student who is blind, can have the computer display the text as spoken words or have the computer print it on a braille printer.
Jennifer, a student with severe physical disabilities can change the display (e.g. turn the pages) with a single blink of her eye.
Michael, a student with dyslexia, can click on a difficult word to have the computer read it aloud or link it instantly to a context-based definition.
In these ways, digital versions of traditional curricular materials can effectively reduce barriers to learning, thereby reducing the costs associated with expensive adaptations and pull-out programs.
With digital curricula, we can reduce barriers and we can do much more. In a recently completed research study (with technology developed under support from U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs), researchers at CAST digitized books being used to teach reading and embedded research-based strategies for improving reading comprehension into the new, flexible, digital texts. Nearly all of the 109 students in the study had learning disabilities and were performing at least two grade levels below their peers. Because of the digital texts, the level of access and support for reading comprehension could be adjusted closely to each child-providing the foundation for highly efficient learning.
The results were stunning - the students who used the digital texts found them more accessible, enjoyable, and empowering than traditional books, and they learned reading comprehension strategies much more effectively, showing highly significant improvements (achieving a half year's progress after reading only three novels) on later standardized tests of reading comprehension. The control group, comparable learning-disabled students who used traditional printed books, showed no significant progress at all. Further, where this approach was used, students exhibited fewer behavioral problems because they were engaged in the learning activity.
Where can schools get these kinds of digital books? Local solutions are far too inefficient. While many schools across the country, like Concord, have begun to digitize their own books, the duplication of effort wastes valuable resources. And it will get worse. As more schools engage in digitizing printed curriculum, more resources will be poured into a redundant, inefficient effort. Schools and national publishers also face a bewildering and contradictory array of local requirements and formats.
A new piece of proposed legislation, the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act of 2001, is critical. This bill provides for the establishment of a single national electronic file format to be used by publishers when creating electronic versions of texts. A consistent standard will greatly facilitate the timely and efficient conversion of textbooks into digital versions that are accessible to students with disabilities: e.g. braille, large print, digital audio and other specialized formats like those that I have been describing. The proposed bill further calls for a national electronic file repository- a central and efficient solution to replace a hodge-podge of local ones.
OSEP, under part D of IDEA, is supporting efforts that further the development of digital curriculum. For example, OSEP funds the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum housed at CAST. Research, design, development, dissemination, and training relating to digital curriculum materials urgently needs expanded support.
Making traditional books and printed materials accessible via new technology is a necessary but not sufficient step if all learners are to find the opportunities they deserve. In effect, we are still using new technologies to do old things. My colleagues on this panel have been describing ways to use powerful new technologies to do NEW things - to engage all students in active experimentation at a level impossible in "traditional" classrooms, to communicate about learning with other students all over the world, to evaluate their own learning, to construct problem solutions in social groups, to create and edit new kinds of media well beyond the limits of writing text. These technologies prepare students for their future.
Unfortunately, the design of most of these learning technologies does not consider students with disabilities. As a result, innumerable new barriers for students with disabilities are being created inadvertently every day. These powerful new learning technologies are in their infancy, as yet unformed. Once formed, disseminated, and in use, these technologies will have to be retrofitted, or new assistive technologies designed, to overcome the new barriers being designed while we are discussing these issues.
An analogy well known to members of this panel will illustrate my point. Several decades ago, the new technology of television was inaccessible for viewers who were deaf. Eventually, decoder boxes to display captions improved access to television for deaf viewers. The cost of this retrofitted technology, several hundred dollars per television, still excluded many people. Legislation requiring televisions to include caption display technology led to the development of small decoder chips costing pennies apiece that were then included on all new televisions. The beneficiaries of this high quality, efficient technology include not only those who are deaf, but also hearing individuals, in gyms and noisy airports, spouses retiring at different times, and individuals learning English as a second language.
The concept of building accessibility into learning technology from the start is an example of what is called Universal Design. Well-executed Universal Design leads to less expensive solutions and better outcomes for all learners. At this moment in history, with rapid proliferation of learning technologies, it is imperative that we make Universal Design an urgent, high priority.
The recent history of Section 508 illustrates the potential national problem if we wait. Most government web sites were originally created with little or no awareness of disability access options. The mandate to make such sites accessible has led to enormous expense in retrofitting these designs-adding electronic "ramps" after the designs were completed. Had the knowledge of Universal Design approaches been available, time and dollars could have been saved, and more people could have enjoyed access to these important sites from the beginning.
To ensure that learning technologies work for all learners, Congress can take the same kind of leadership as it did in legislating 508 for the workplace - in this case in the "learning place."
I commend the Congress for its leadership and its commitment to students with disabilities. Fundamental to this commitment, and to all of the things I have recommended, is the leadership implicit in IDEA. I strongly support the commitment to fund this foundational legislation for our future.
In the innovative area of educational technology it is essential not only to provide support under Part B of IDEA, it is also essential to fund discretionary programs for technology research, training, and dissemination - those under Part D. Without that support we will miss the opportunity, just at this propitious moment, to turn the power of educational technology in a direction that will leave none of our children behind.
In specific, I have made recommendations in three areas:
The over-arching recommendation that I make to you is that we extend the same kinds of protections now afforded to physical spaces and to information in the workplace to a new area, the most important space for our future - learning space. Our future as a culture depends on us to make learning spaces, those most precious spaces in the lives of our children, accessible and supportive of every single child. I believe that if we make the learning spaces of our schools accessible to all of our children, we will save both the short-term costs of poorly educating our children in the present and the long-term costs of NOT educating them for their future. This approach will save resources, but most importantly, it will save children. Thank you.
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