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For some students with writing challenges, the thought is, “Oh my goodness, if you’re having difficulties with spelling, why not just talk to your computer?” The challenge with talking to your computer is the computer literally writes down word for word, and sound for sound on what you say. Now, six years ago, to be able to train a voice recognition program, it took about six hours to train at around an 80% accuracy rate. So if I dictated 100 words, 80% or 80 of those 100 words would be recognized properly.

In the past, one of the barriers to using technology is that students felt they were standing out as being different. So they didn’t want to open that laptop in the classroom. But today, so many people have smartphones and tablets. So I may be looking at the same webpage as my friend, but I’m just using the added feature of having my headphones on, and having it read out loud to me, whereas everybody thinks I might be listening to music. I’ve just disguised myself.

Assistive technology has evolved from something that was very specialized to something that is much broadly used. Fifteen years ago, we had special technology for people who had visual impairments and students who had hearing impairments and people who had motor impairments and then, to help students with learning challenges, we drew on that technology. So someone who was unable to read due to a reading disability, well, we could pull on the technology that the vision impaired person was using, text to speech software, the ability to read text out loud to someone.

CAST has developed a wonderful website on universal design for learning. It offers a terrific guide to developing lessons in a way that will be accessible and engaging for all students.