The Challenge to Education Policymakers:
Delivering an Accessible Curriculum
through Technology

One fruitful change would be to design universal access into technology, said Deborah Kaplan, Vice President of the World Institute on Disability. Engineers often design technology for people like themselves, "mostly men in their 20s who don't have any apparent disabilities," said Kaplan, whom President Clinton recently appointed to the National Information Infrastructure Task Force. For example, one of the most popular commercial information services, America Online, has a graphic user interface that renders the service essentially inaccessible to the blind.

Kaplan said that schools have a major role to play in promoting universal access. They must be made aware of software and hardware with built-in accessibility, then use their buying power to support it. Doing so is particularly important now, with schools poised to invest heavily in links to the national information infrastructure. Kaplan believes that we should "leverage the buying power of the states and the schools to make sure that disabled kids will be able to use the same technology everybody else is using."

As accessible technology becomes more widely disseminated, the price will fall. Kaplan noted that decoder boxes for receiving closed-captioned television initially cost several hundred dollars. Then, when federal policy mandated that all television sets be manufactured with this capacity, the cost plummeted to less than 25 cents per television. "There's a lesson there about market efficiencies and mass-marketing accessibility," she said.

Paul G. Hearne, President of the Dole Foundation for Employment of People with Disabilities, noted that one of the standard arguments advanced by industry--that there is no consumer demand for accessible technology--has a familiar ring. About 20 years ago, representatives of bus companies contended that there was no demand for accessible buses because "we never see any people with disabilities on the bus." "That's because they can't get on the bus," retorted advocates for people with disabilities. "It's the same thing with the information infrastructure," Hearne said. "We have to argue that from the beginning the information infrastructure must be accessible to people with disabilities of all types."

Along with universal design, other possible approaches for changing the rules of the game include:

• Creating "schools without walls" for students with disabilities. H. Rutherford Turnbull III, Co-Director of the University of Kansas's Beach Center on Families and Disability, recommended that to help prepare students for employment, technology should bring the community to the classroom and the classroom to the community. "If you can have driver's education or pilot training where you bring the highway or the skyway to the student," he said, "why can't we do the same thing to bring the community to the student in the public school?"

• Bringing higher education into the loop. Colleges and universities ought to provide data and services to state and local education agencies, Turnbull said. "Those agencies in turn could bring the research and demonstration programs into the classrooms for the students."

• Making full use of existing legislation and policy initiatives. According to Turnbull, two recent statutes and an initiative--the Technology-Related Assistance Act of 1988, Goals 2000, and the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research's program "Constituency-Oriented Research and Development"-- create important opportunities, and "we ought to take better advantage of those."

  

• Supporting sympathetic people in industry. Some industry people are interested in universal access and other needs of the disability community, said Steve Saleh, a volunteer at the White House Office of Science and Technology, but they are often isolated within company structures. "One of the things that the disability community needs to do is to assist these individuals in developing credibility within their companies."

• Getting people with disabilities involved in developing the technology. Michael Hartman, Manager of the Employment Program for People with Disabilities at the NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center, said that more young people with disabilities should be encouraged to study technology, science, and engineering as a way of gaining power over future technological advances. The issue is not simply how we teach children with disabilities, he noted, but also what we teach them.

• Teaching people in government about the technologies. "There are vast bureaucracies at the federal, state, and local levels where we need to be educating bureaucrats about what is possible and why it is necessary," said Clarence J. Sundram, Commissioner of the New York State Commission on Quality of Care for the Mentally Disabled. Many of the battles between advocacy groups and government agencies, he said, result from the fact that "bureaucrats don't understand technology--they haven't been trained on what is possible."

• Teaching people with disabilities about the technologies. Paul Parravano, Assistant for Community Relations at MIT, noted that what seem to be technological breakthroughs sometimes turn out to be dead ends; for example, "lots of reading technology did not fulfill its promise." Even successful technologies can pose difficult choices for users. Parravano noted that MIT uses Macintosh computers, whereas many blind people use IBM compatibles. "When I tried to get information on Macintosh disks or help with training, I found it pretty difficult."

• Reducing the alienation that many young people with disabilities feel. "When I go around our nation and hear young people tell me that what they expect after high school is to end up on social security, something is terribly wrong," said Robert Williams of the Administration on Developmental Disabilities. "Technology is only a tool. It is up to us to help young people use that power."

---

The students we got to know this morning are all very much exceptions to the rule, in that they all obviously received not just the technology, but also the training and the extensive, ongoing support to put that technology to everyday use. Our challenge is not to come up with just a few more exceptions but to change the rules of the game entirely.

This is not simply for the benefit of students with disabilities. We know what the 21st century holds. The key to a full and productive life, as individuals and as a nation, rests on our ability to access and master communication technology of every sort.

Robert Williams, Commissioner,
Administration on Developmental Disabilities,
Department of Health and Human Services

---

---

Information is the currency of inclusion. If we don't bring the school to the community and the community to the school, if we don't bring the databases, the regulations, the techniques of instruction to the parents and the parents into the schoolhouse, then we will not have completed the seamless web of which the administration has spoken. The seamless web has to include the students, the schools, the families, and the institutions of higher education. . . .

If state and local education agencies and parent groups are connected through the technologies, so that the seamless web takes in the research, the demonstrations, the excellence that we have out there, I don't think there will be any end to our capacity to include people with disabilities--not only in the schools but ultimately where they ought to be, in the mainstream of the communities.

H. Rutherford Turnbull III, Co-Director,
Beach Center on Families and Disability,
University of Kansas

---

---

We have to move away from thinking about adaptive technology as the main solution for making technology accessible to people with disabilities, and begin thinking instead about universal design, where we design technology for everybody. We have to start working with industry to come up with standards and guidelines. . . .

Schools and libraries are in a unique position to begin asking vendors: How can disabled kids use the technology that we're about to spend millions of dollars on? Can our kids with disabilities use it, or are we going to saddle special education with extra costs to purchase adaptive technology that may or may not even work with the technology that the other kids are using?

Deborah Kaplan, Vice President,
World Institute on Disability

---

---

Part of the difficulty is getting information about the technology. . . . When I attended college and law school, much of this technology was not available. I did my work with tapes and readers, the old-fashioned way. As a matter of fact, I didn't start using computer technology until I started working at MIT, in part because I had a large degree of uncertainty about what kind of computer format my future employer would be using.

I raise this, as someone with a disability, because it is confusing, even devastating, to purchase and get trained in technology that ends up not being useful in the school or job you end up in.

Paul Parravano,
Assistant for Community Relations, MIT

---