Video Lesson: Experiences with Assistive Technology of Students with Disabilities

Students who use assistive technology in their daily lives will present the experiences and challenges they face when using assistive technology to follow lectures and study, and will propose possible improvements in the use of assistive technology in teaching.

Watch the video lesson on the topic: Experiences with Assistive Technology of Students with Disabilities.

Duration: 7 minutes and 32 seconds

Transcript

Experiences of students with disabilities in the Republic of Croatia with the use of assistive technology for following lectures and learning.

In recent years, assistive technology in the Republic of Croatia has become more accessible, although there are still challenges in procurement and application. Students using assistive technology in their daily lives and for the needs of following lectures and learning will present the experiences they encounter when using assistive technology for attending classes and studying.

What assistive technology do you use in your daily life for following lectures and learning?

ANDRIJA TABAK, student

Text-to-speech reads the text to you, because since I read slowly, it allows me to keep pace with my colleagues. And as I have a disability with slow reading, speech-to-text allows me to search and find something faster when reading seminar papers or the like.

ELENA MRKONJA, student

For following lectures and learning, I most often use a computer and a mobile phone.

I also use a Braille electronic notepad, which is the Braille Note Touch. This is a newer version of the Braille notepad that also has a screen, which can then be used by a sighted person when the speech unit is turned off. And they can see what is on the screen. It also has a Braille line and a keyboard on which you type using the way Braille is written. I only write 8-dot, not 6-dot as is written on a machine. I mostly use that notepad, but less often because it does not handle large documents well, like those we have for studying. More often, I use a computer and a mobile phone for conversion. If the text does not want to convert into a more accessible format with the programs I have on my computer, then I convert it with my mobile phone.

What are your experiences with using assistive technology for following lectures and learning?

ANDRIJA TABAK, student

As far as learning is concerned, it is good, I use it, but sometimes it has to be adapted because the programs are not really adapted to the Croatian language, as the Croatian language is phonetically difficult for it to understand which word you meant to say. So, quite often I switch to English so I can search and find something faster. Also, when I listen to something, when the narrator reads to me, I often listen in English to make it smoother, so that I can better understand the content of the text.

As for following the lectures, some professors taught me to record the lectures on a dictaphone so I could listen to them more easily, since I cannot take notes like someone who sees. A     t that time, it was not yet possible to turn on assistive technology and have it write things down.

ELENA MRKONJA, student

My experiences are very good, and they are getting better year after year because things are really improving, even in terms of artificial intelligence. Just a few years ago, it was completely impossible for me to read content from images. I wasn't too bothered about anything that existed. It often wasn't very clear when trying to extract text, but there has been much progress. The programs I use, for example, Be My Eyes or Vision AI or FineReader, all of them are making great progress, so they can extract text from images very well, or from PDF documents that are illegible when converted into more accessible forms, like a Word document or text. If that doesn't work, if they are garbled, then I simply convert those PDFs into images and then, using the Be My Eyes application, it extracts the text image by image, and then the order in the text is a little bit better.

What are your suggestions for improvement in the use of assistive technology in teaching? ANDRIJA TABAK, student

My suggestions are that when you have material in the classroom, the PDFs should not be images. Because when I, or rather we, use assistive technology and want to copy something, to copy some text, it recognizes it as an image and says, "copy image." And we need a copy of the text. And if you see a picture on the screen, that means nothing to us. Because there are converters, but the converters are either for purchase or are not developed well enough.

For older scanned materials, at least for me, they were scanned from old books where you could see that they were underlined and so on. And then that converter cannot understand whether it's, I don't know, a U or an O for example. So then, in the material, there's something illegible, and then you have to figure out for yourself which letter is being mistaken for which. Quite often it happens to me and my colleagues that, I don't know, it reads O as J on one page, and then differently on the opposite page. So, you cannot use the "Replace All" function because you will still get the wrong result.

ELENA MRKONJA, student

My suggestions are that the documents that professors put on Omega or teachers, instructors in lower phases of teaching and education, should be as less graphically demanding as possible, at least in the materials that are adapted for us. If there is something that can help sighted colleagues, then sure, but in that case, they should send us documents with as few graphical additions as possible because that interferes with screen readers. Most often, it is precisely those graphical additions or accent marks or different fonts or something, that are the reason why the document becomes very difficult to read and garbled after the conversion into a more accessible format.

Despite the challenges existing in Croatia regarding accessibility and the use of assistive technology, this technology enables independent and quality studying for students with disabilities. It is a necessary factor in ensuring inclusive higher education.