The Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI) site I found for the previous activity has numerous links to articles I found useful. The two sections of this site I really enjoy are the K to12 Education Technology Centre Homepage and the EASI Street to Science, Engineering and Math.
From the K to12 Education Technology Centre Homepage page I was able to access Adaptive Technology Basics at the following url: http://www.rit.edu/~easi/ak12/k12/k12basics.html. From this site I was able to learn about augmentitive and alternative communication devices such as the liberator which is used for highly intelligent individuals with limited speech. Urbana Middle School currently has a number of students using similar devices. I personally have not had anyone in my class that has needed such a device but it was interesting seeing the different methods that can be used for communication. I am however more familar with the braille and sensory aids having had a blind student and several visually impaired students. I was amazed to discover how much I relied on using visual descriptions in my teaching. Luckily I had a student who would call me on it and make me describe objects for him or allow him to handle things. This particular student loved computers and at the time I really did not know how to take advantage of this. I still am not to sure how I would handle this but it is nice to see that sofware has been developed to act as screenreaders or speech output for macs and pcs.
Along similar lines the article SCIENTIFIC READING AND WRITING BY BLIND PEOPLE - TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE (url:http://www.rit.edu/~easi/easisem/gardnerj.html) focused on new technologies designed to aid people with "print disabilities" read, write and manipulate information such as mathematical equations, graphs charts and diagrams. The article described several technologies that all relied on the files being either in LaTeX language or converted into it. These programs run mostly on UNIX or DOS machines and all create some sort of tactile output for the visually impaiored student to use for interpretation. This type of technology would have been fantastic when I was teaching the blind young man I had three years ago. When ever we graphed data we improvised by creating a traditional style line or bar graph using his braille typewriter. It was marginally effective at best.
The final article I read was ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING DISABILITIES (url: http://www.rit.edu/~easi/easisem/gardnerc.html). The most common disability I encounter as a teacher is learning disiblilties. Learning disabilities fall into a wide spectrum from visual motor, writing, to computation to name a few. I have found that many LD students are very comfortable using computers to assist them with their work. For many of these students it is much less laborious to type activities than it is to write them plus it gives them tha added bonus of spell check. This particular article focused on the use of technology with math disabilities. I was a little disappointed in that they seemed to indicate that computers are good especially for drill and practice. Though I think this is valuable I think that using graphing software as well as problem solving activities would be just as valuable. The article did emphasize that it forsees future technologies focusing on experimental simulations to help students with disablities.
Prior to researching accessibility and the use of technologies to aid disibilities I had never given these topics much thought. I think it is important to consider these issues, especially web access. The world wide web can be a powerful teaching tool and should not be kept from anyone. In the future I will try to be sensitive to this especially for the students in my classroom.