Visually, but Not Digitally, Impaired

When officials at the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired were shopping for a learning management system (LMS) to deliver their online curriculum, they kept running into the same problem: Every system was primarily designed to serve the needs of the sighted.

So Hadley built its own.

“At Hadley, we think about students with disabilities first,” said Andre Lukatsky, director of computer services.

This is the philosophy that guides the Winnetka, Illinois-based nonprofit institute, which has been upending the notion that distance education and the blind don’t mix since well before the invention of the internet.

Founded in 1920 to teach Braille to the blind through mail-delivery courses and , the institute still offers correspondence courses. But now it leverages computers, smart phones and a range of assistive tools to provide online learning services to more than 10,000 off-site students.

Hadley bills itself as the No. 1 provider of online and distance education to the blind and visually impaired and “the only entity delivering its programs entirely through distance education,” according to senior vice president Dawn Turco.

All the institute’s courses are free to the legally blind and their family members, with a curriculum that spans from high-school-level education to job training to independent life skills like cooking, dining or socializing.  

In a traditional classroom environment, blind students often spend as much time learning to use associated technologies as they do digesting and understanding the material. While noting that the situation has improved in recent years, Lukatsky said the traditional classroom still has limitations that make it difficult for blind and disabled students to learn.

“When you have an activity that’s difficult to use, it increases the cognitive load and detracts from the learning process, because the student has to figure out how to accomplish the activity rather than focus on the learning objective,” Lukatsky said.

In addition to the regular use of teaching tools like white boards and textbooks that are less than blind-friendly, a lack of consistent and reliable transportation to and from campuses are pushing more blind and disabled students to accessible online or distance learning programs.

“I think [that] is the main reason why more and more students with a disability are taking advantage” of online learning, Lukatsky said.

Hungry for Technology

Smart phones have upended the assistive technology market, with many blind advocacy organizations reporting a hunger in their community to take advantage of the accessibility features on iPhone and Android devices.

Tech companies are becoming more proactive building assistive technologies into their products. Apple is frequently praised for this, and because of its size and prestige, many other mainstream technology companies follow "have followed"?Apple’s lead. Lukatsky believes this trend will eventually lessen the financial burden that comes with assistive technology.

“Ten years ago, if you wanted to have a screen reading program, that would cost $1,000. If you wanted a Braille display, that would cost you $6,000,” he said. “Now, there are free screen-reading programs and some operating systems come with them already built in.”

Hadley hires blind instructors to teach blind and low-vision students how to navigate smart phone assistive technology. The institute also offers iFocus, a video section on its website that provides tips for using accessibility features in iOS.

Moving forward, Hadley plans to expand its instructional iFocus videos, tackling the vision accessibility features on the Mac next, Turco said.

Plus, through its new webinar platform called Seminars@Hadley, the institute can develop continuing education for the Hadley Institute for Professional Studies, she added.

Accessibility Lawsuits

A series of legal developments over the past 20 years forced technology developers and manufacturers to make products more accessible to the disabled community. In 1996, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to include standards mandating that any technology or communications company seeking to do business with the government had to have built-in accessibility features.

The 2010 Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act requires most advanced communications services, products and web browsers to be accessible to the blind, deaf and other groups with disabilities.

In 2010 maybe say "That same year" so the two back-to-back sentences don't lead with "2010" a civil rights complaint and subsequent lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind against Pennsylvania State University alleged that many computer and technology-based services on campus were inaccessible to the blind and in violation of the Disabilities Act.

The PSU I think we just say "Penn State" later settled with the organization after agreeing to audit its technology policies and implement a corrective strategy -- something Lukatsky believes influenced the technology industry to take the needs of the disabled seriously.

Meanwhile, nonprofits like the American Foundation for the Blind offer in-house lawyers and technology experts to help businesses design products in legal, accessible ways.

“Often times things are preemptively done with accessibility built in to protect companies from litigation. Sometimes it's litigation that brings on these features,” Lukatsky said.

Leveraging Technologies, Retrofitting Content

Accessibility has greatly influenced how the Hadley designs its 100 online and distance education courses. Its IT infrastructure is built to conform to web content guidelines developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium. The W3 preaches four underlying principles for technology design to “lay the foundation necessary for anyone to access and use” web content.

For the visually disabled, the best technologies are ones that leverage audio with “different sounds for menus, selection and error conditions” as well as “tactile feedback” and cues to the user, according to the National Federation of the Blind’s consumer electronic shopping guide.

However, overcoming one of the biggest obstacles to teaching the blind doesn’t require a new piece of technology. In a 2013 survey by the University of North Carolina on academic challenges faced by blind students, researchers found an intense need to retrofit the ocean of physical and digital content available to take advantage of existing assistive technologies, like screen readers, magnifiers and voice-to-text programs.

“Though the [assistive technology] picture appears to be quite rosy, inaccessibility of learning materials and increasing focus on visual curriculum, poses paramount challenge to the information revolution,” write the authors.

Lukatsky believes there are two components to this problem: hardware and software. Manufacturers can build accessibility features into products, but software and apps must be designed to take advantage of those features. Simply having the capability on the hardware is not sufficient if the software isn’t compatible.

“If you are in a wheelchair, you have assistive tech to help you navigate,” he said. “But if you come to a building with no ramp, even though you have the technology, you are not going to be able to use that building.”