My name is Linda Doran my title here at UCC would be assistive technology officer and I support students with disabilities that are registered. I support them in a number of ways when they come into the college at the beginning of the year we do an assessment because you have students coming in using no assistive technology. They may have acquired a disability or they may have just learned that they have a learning disability. So they may come with no technology at all. Even students coming with existing technology they may have it for a few years so we look at what they are using and we see if there is anything out there that would be better. Even some of the technology they have used at second level of education may not be appropriate third level because if they’ve been in second level in
Ireland
you’re basically in once classroom the teacher comes to you where as in the university situation it is very different. They are going to be moving around a lot, say for example, a visually impaired student may have used a ccctv in a classroom situation which would not be feasible in a university environment so we then look at what would then suit them.
We also have to take into account if the course they are going to be doing has a work placement so the supports we are putting in place are going to work for the workplace as well because there is no point in giving them one set of supports for first and second year then in third year change everything because of the work placement. So the assessment is very important at the start of the year. Based on that then we do a funding application for the government and get the equipment for them and when that comes in we purchase the equipment and set it up and train the student in how to use it.
The training would be ongoing when they are in college because people do both assistive technology training and information technology training because we feel very strongly that students should be leaving university with very good IT skills if they are going out into the workplace. It is important for any student but for a student with a disability to be able to say to a employer I have this level of IT. The training would be ongoing for 3 years and they would come in from time to time maybe because they have changed course or something has happened their illness has progressed and maybe the equipment they were using up until now is no longer appropriate. So we reassess their equipment from time to time to make sure that it is working for them. Maybe something new has come into the market that we are happy about and we feel it might make their life a little bit easier so we would make that available to them.
Within the university we try to mainstream technology as much as we can. Its not possible to mainstream everything so within the office here we have this room which would be the assessment and training room and then we have an open access lab in the back that has 6 PCs that would have all the of the software that we would use but because we are only open office hours we work with the computer center to make the software accessible on labs across the campus. Now for somebody like a dyslexic student who would be using a program called Read and Write its possible to that on every machine on campus but for a blind student using Jaws it wouldn’t be possible to put Jaws on every computer across campus, so we would have designated computers in the library would have jaws and then depending on the course that the student was doing we would put jaws in that particular lab. This year we have started to use something called Dongle so the student can go around to any lab, but it only works in demo mode. The college is moving towards more wireless access so in that situation if a student is using a laptop there is no reason why they would not be able to use it the same way so they would not be dependent on the labs. We feel it’s important to mainstream the software anyway so the students are not isolated and don’t have to come up to us but they can mix with their peers if its group work they are doing or a project.
