Connecting to Learn

In Connecting to Learn: Educational & Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities¹, Marcia Scherer writes about peoples' need to feel connected to their environment and to each other. She posits that vision and hearing loss lead to a feeling of unconnectedness. Persons with these disabilities are unable to sense environmental clues and have difficulties in some aspects of communication. She advocates matching assistive technology (AT) to students with vision and hearing disabilities, connecting them for greater learning opportunities.

Assistive technology for hearing loss comes in five categories:

• Hearing aids are sound amplification devices worn by the individual.
• Alerting and signaling devices use light or other visual clues to draw attention to a situation like a fire alarm.
• Devices to amplify sound in group situations use broadcast methods, like FM radio signals, to provide individual receivers with a signal.
• Telephone devices like a TTY send non-voice signals over phone lines.
• Telecommunications devices and accommodations for telecommunications technology provide individual amplification for TVs and other telecom devices and also provide closed captioning.

Assistive technology for vision loss, like that for hearing loss, depends on the degree of loss. For example:

• Low vision individuals can use magnification and contrast heighteners.
• Legally blind individuals can use CCTV, magnification, and alternative I/O (input/output) devices for computers.
• Totally blind individuals can use braille, portable note takers, OCR (optical character recognition), and alternative I/O devices.

Scherer provided several statistics within her work. The number of people with hearing loss in the United States is between 22 and 28 million. Vision loss affects about 8 million. Both of these are considered "low incidence" disabilities because of the low numbers of affected individuals. In schools, .15% of the population is serviced for a hearing impairment, .06% for a vision impairment. These numbers, from the 1995-96 school year, compare to 12.43% of the population receiving some kind of special services for a disability.

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(1) Scherer, M. J. (2004). Connecting to learn: Educational & assistive technology for people with disabilities. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.