Apps for Kids with Autism

boy with ipad mashupThis item also published on Maine CITE News.

The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article about the use of “apps” for children with pervasive developmental disorders like autism. They note:

Anecdotally, teachers, parents and therapists describe the profound difference that apps for Apple and Android products have made in helping autistic children develop skills. IPad programs have provided a means of communicating for some children with autism who cannot speak or have language delays. Other apps help children learn to handle social situations that can be stressful, like crowds at malls. And many programs can help develop fine-motor skills, which promote functions like writing or manipulating small objects.

Several lists of apps are provided and readers are encouraged to add more to the list by making a comment.

Read the entire article: Finding Good Apps for Children With Autism

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Photo credit: Licensed by Creative Commons by Notions Capital

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Accessible Tag Cloud gone for now

frustrationAs part of my testing out the new Siteimprove service, it was noted that there were a large number of dead links on the jebswebs blog. It turns out all of them were located in the Accessible Tag Cloud that I have been using for the past year. So, I have disabled the plugin for now and have posted a bug report. We’ll see what happens.

 

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Content quality on public university websites

Moderates mispell too

Note: January 30, 2012: Siteimprove.com has just launched a new website. I will update my links in this article as soon as I can find the old article.

I found a link to this report by Siteimprove.com in the Accessibility group on LinkedIn this morning regarding a recent review made of the websites of 25 public universities in the United States. The study covers five major aspects of each website including which content management systems were used, how many broken links (per CMS) were discovered, misspellings, common accessibility issues, and the use of platform independent document formats. I was immediately drawn to the statistics on “misspellings” and was not surprised to see that there were an average of 107 misspelling per website. The most common misspellings were: “Oportunities, Technolgy, Accessability, Chemisty, Acquistion, Coodinator, Sustainabilty.”

I decided to do this brief blog on the topic noting in particular the misspelling of the word “accessibility.” It was about then that I noticed that in MY previous blog entry I had misspelled the word “Assistive.”

In all fairness, the spell-checker in my browser does not know how to spell “assistive” either.

C’est la vie.

Read the whole report…

PS: I fixed the other blog entry and am looking for more typos…

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Photo credit: Licensed through Creative Commons by akachela

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Assistive Touch on new iPhone

VoiceOver logoI saw this new feature demoed at the ACTEM MainEducation Conference last month when Apple accessibility expert Sarah Herrlinger gave a presentation on the accessibility features of iOS and Mac OSX. It was particularly exciting since the new official iOS 5.0 was released the day before and I had just installed it on my iPad.

While much of Sarah’s presentation covered accessibility features I was already fairly familiar with (i.e., VoiceOver, screen flashing for deaf/hard-of-hearing folks, and sticky keys for folks with mobility impairments), she started off demonstrating the new AssistiveTouch feature. It was a lot to absorb.

I had almost forgotten about AssistiveTouch until yesterday when I discovered New York Times tech dude David Pogue’s article from November 10th where he described the new AssistiveTouch features in greater (and great) detail.

Rather than having me comment any further, please head over to Pogue’s Post entitled Apple’s AssistiveTouch Helps the Disabled Use a Smartphone

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No more bricks and mortar

bricks and mortarAbout 15 years ago, I was invited to participate in a strategic planning process at a prominent university located in southern Maine. I had recently been hired to oversee their new distance learning masters in Education program and had volunteered to serve as the university’s webmaster. The strategic planning process involved a series of focus group sessions with various faculty and administrators all run by a Boston-based higher education consulting group. Being very interested in distance learning and the potential for the newly invented “World Wide Web,” I was eager to participate and share my vision of the university of the future. Indeed the summer prior, I had taught a seminar on the “future of education” and had a chance to read up on what the futurists were thinking about. I remember the phrase “bricks and mortar to ‘clicks’ and mortar” having been recently penned and my long view was that universities that were investing in buildings and not into server silos were bound to fail.

When I had the opportunity to meet with one of the focus groups, most of the other faculty were rather traditional types who had graced the campus for many years and appeared to enjoy their roles as “sage on the stage.” There was quite a bit of skepticism about distance learning and even though I had a positive reputation for teaching in the traditional modality at that university, the majority of faculty didn’t really seem to value what I was doing.

When it came my time to talk, I chattered away about my views and how as an institution we needed to get out there and expand out “presence” on the Internet and World Wide Web, that we needed to build more server capacity and in particular, not invest in the large scale college library expansion program that was in the works. I remember the look of disdain on the faces of my colleague, but I pressed forward. I can remember one asking me if I really believed that there would come a time when traditional students would actually take distance learning classes in lieu of the campus-based, terrestrial offerings that then were the norm.

The gentleman who was leading the focus group appeared to welcome my vision and even though I suspect he was not suppose to shape the discussion, he gave me lots of clear messages that he thought my vision was indeed the correct one.

The library project did go forward, but on a much smaller scale. Fortunately, the director of the library was also a very smart guy and he and his staff had already seen the writing on the walls. In fact, he eventually became the vice president in charge of information technology at the university and shepherded through a rather dramatic number of technology advances in the next decade.

With this backdrop, I read the recent news story about the pending closure of the medical library at Johns Hopkins University. While this is a loss of tradition, it is clearly, as the title mentions, a sign of the times. The author makes this clever observation:

People don’t go to Johns Hopkins for appendectomies. They go there with rare and difficult conditions to seek help from the top medical minds in the world. If I’m at Hopkins as a patient and not to visit old friends and colleagues, I don’t want my team of physicians and residents to be searching through the stacks for possible answers or keys to my treatment. I want them to pull out their iPads and have instant access to the information they need to make me better.

Read the whole article “Sign of the times: Johns Hopkins shutters its medical library.

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Photo credit: Image licensed through Creative Commons by Brett Jordan

 

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