Slide 1: Title Slide
NADP VC2020 Week 9 Video 1 TranscriptionThe accessibility revolution in assistive technology, and what it means for us. Rich Nind, Sheffield Hallam UniversityWednesday 19th August 2020Slide 1: Title SlideThe Accessibility Revolution in Assistive Technology, and what it means for usRichard NindSheffield Hallam UniversityPresentation: Hi and welcome to this presentation. My name is Richard Nind and I’m the technical adviser at Sheffield Hallam University. The title of the presentation is ‘The accessibility revolution in assistive technology and what it means for us’. Slide 2: Assisstive Technology is becoming more accessible(Time: 0.25)Easier to AccessEasier to UsePresentation: So, this is really a presentation just about some of the trends in assistive technology and what’s happening on the ground; what you can expect to see more of in the next few years and also what it means for us as practitioners, as well, in supporting disabled students. My central thesis really is that assistive technology is becoming much more accessible; its becoming easier to access, so, it’s becoming much easier for our students to get hold of outside of the recognised systems: DSA, Access to Work, apprenticeship funds and so on. So, it’s becoming easier for them to get and it’s also becoming a lot easier to use which is because of trends happening in the way of software is developed nowadays too which I’ll talk about.Slide 3: Traditional Model(Time: 1:19)Purchased up front through government schemesHigh upfront costFeedback from gatekeepers (assessors, resellers, me!)Runs on one computer or platformPay for upgrades and new featuresPresentation: So, I’ve been in assistive technology since the mid-2000s and for a long time, I think, things have been very stable in the way that we deliver assistive technology to the users. A lot of assistive technology is purchased through government schemes for users whether they be students, employees, and so on, or purchased through local councils or colleges or things like that. There’s been a high upfront cost for assistive technology traditionally. Most software packages top ?100. Many go into the ?100s up to, possibly, even ?1000s for specialist software equipment for visually impaired students and that’s, kind of, been unavoidable really as it is just the only way it has been viable for a lot of companies to develop and deliver assistive technology. The technology, as I have said, because it has been sold through government schemes – a lot of the discussion and dialogue around what is needed in assistive technologies has been between the developers of the technology and the gatekeepers, if you like, people like us: assessors, disability advisers, resellers (who sell the technology for the developers) and people like me who work in assistive technology. So, again that is another thing which is, there is nothing wrong with it really, it is a natural thing that has happened as it is very hard for developers to get feedback directly from the usersAnd there has been this very traditional model of providing software or technology so you might get some software that will just work on just one computer, you get a licence key and it will just work there. It will only work on your Windows PC, it won’t work on your MAC PC, if you have one of those as well and vice versa. You get one piece of software – you might get some updates with it as it goes along, some security updates but for the upgrades, you have to pay for a new version, for the new features. You might need to pay for a better version and so on.Slide 4: AT as a service(Time: 3:49)Subscription Pricing or freeDirect to consumerCloud-based, always connectedUse on any platformAlways up to dateFeedback from user (UX)Your data improves the productPresentation: And I think that’s meant that software has been developed in quite a particular way in where features and customisation have been emphasised really; rather than the user-experience. I think now though, particularly in the last few years, we are starting to move into what is called the ‘software as a service’ model where the developers of technologies are much more concerned with selling and interacting directly with the user of the technology and the user, kind of, leases the technology rather than purchasing it outright. We are all familiar with this model through our Netflix, Spotify and Apple Music subscriptions where we pay a certain amount each month and we get access to those platforms to watch the TV shows or listen to the music on those platforms but, when we stop paying, our access after a short time is cut. That kind of model has taken over software as well. When you think about Adobe Cloud; when you think about Office 365; suddenly that software that may have cost you ?200, ?300,?400 upfront to buy, now costs you ?5, ?6 or ?10 a month so you can spread the cost much more easily. So, specialist software, or even just software that we need for a particular purpose, has become a lot more accessible now for the users. And it is much more easy to find for users too as they don’t have to get a software catalogue or come to us to find what software is available. There are app stores – they can market it through the web; advertise through Google and YouTube and so on to get their software, their technology into their users’ hands. Now there are a few other really important characteristics here with this model of providing software which are really important for the user, and for us to understand. The software is typically cloud-based so you might get a small app on your computer or you might use it purely through the web but a lot of the software works via the internet so you need to be connected all the time. We can often use the software on any platform, use the technology on any platform at all and we can have it on Windows, MACS our phones or whatever.Software always stays up to date. So, before, we used to have a lot of issues with students not having particular versions of Windows and their version of their software didn’t work on that version of Windows. A lot of those issues have gone now. Windows 10 is operating on this service model. So, students, if they have Windows, should always have the most up-to-date version of Windows and if they have the most up-to-date version of software as well, those problems, kind of, go away.I think, really importantly, for this kind of software model or technology model, the developers are much more interested in getting the feedback from the user, than from the gatekeepers like us, and they will use the data from the product as well for feedback. So, for example, they will look at how many clicks it takes someone to get to a particular feature; does someone, people try to use a particular feature and then give up? All that data going back to the developer so they can improve the product and what often happens as a result of that is that products get simplified over time and become easier to use.Slide 5: Grammarly(Time: 8.06)Advert for Grammarly‘It is actually correcting everything’See more in GrammerlyFree download at Presentation: A really really good example of this type of approach to software is Grammarly. So Grammarly is a proofing tool, it does spell checking it does a lot of the things that we associate with some of the literacy software that people get through DSA so it checks for homophones um mistakes and so on. It also does stuff which is only really possible because of the data it's getting from the user such as being able to correct verb tenses, very specific types of errors and to advise on writing style. The really interesting thing about Grammarly it doesn't advertise itself as assistive technology, it doesn't use any of the terminology we usually see when assisted technology is marketed. It markets itself as a tool for people in school or college or in work who need a bit of writing support and it markets directly to them through Google, through Youtube adverts, even tv adverts as well in the states. And the user pays through subscription and can use the app on pretty much any device they want.Again, there's a massive focus on simplification on user experience, in tools like Grammarly and when I talk about this simplification, it's worth actually giving a bit of an example here so we'll look at speech to text in this regard. Slide 6: Dragon Naturally SpeakingImage: result for dragon naturally speakingPresentation: This is dragon, it's a screenshot I grabbed off the internet um we can see Dragon's got its toolbar, it's got lots of menus underneath that toolbar, it's got the correction menu which has got about 10 different options, and I'm, not a criticism at all I really love Dragon I've trained loads and loads of students to use it but it's a specialist app, it's got a degree of complexity and needs a degree of training.Slide 7: Dictate Screenshot of Dictate being used in Microsoft Word. It is un-intrusive and only requires one button click to use.Presentation: Recently, and this is something I'll talk about in a little while as well which is really important, the main technology platforms have started to build some of these access tools into their own products so Microsoft now has speech to text which is the dictate feature, it's available in home and you can see on the top right hand corner we've got the dictate button we press it and we literally start talking and that's basically the dictate feature. Mac OS, it's kind of even more simple really, you press a keyboard shortcut, you get a little icon and you talk and when you're done, you press the button and it's transcribed your work for you and that's basically how you use speech text on a mac device. There's a massive trade-off there between what talked about in terms of sophistication, customisation for usability. You can't at the moment do any of the kind of really cool correction stuff or vocabulary extensions we do in Dragon but the idea is, that kind of approach to speech to text is going to be good enough for a lot of people. Slide 8: os x dictationImage: result for osx dictationSlide 9: Implications Simplificationpricing and distribution privacyPresentation: So that gives a quick overview of how the approach to developing these technologies and making these technologies available is changing. There are a lot of implications of this, I've talked a lot about simplification. So the way technologies are being developed now they've been being developed to make make them as user-friendly as possible.That does mean you're going to lose some degree of the customisation, the complexity that some users are going to need. Pricing and distribution so it means that assistive technologies are potentially going to be available and they are available actually in terms of think about things like Grammarly, they are available to students to purchase themselves or to to start using before they even get to the stage of seeing us in our roles and you know some of these technologies they're not really very compatible with the systems we've got at the moment. I know for example um Grammarly isn't available through DSA.And that isn't really the fault of anybody it's just that as a company, it doesn't choose to work with retailers, it wants to sell directly to its users and it does want us out directly to universities and workplaces as well that's its model. So sometimes students may be coming in asking for technologies and it may be difficult for us to provide them. I think privacy is important as well, that's a big consideration so a lot of these tools more and more are going to rely on taking our data and feeding it into their own algorithms to make their product better, to make the product viable and there are privacy issues about if we're downloading free tools or inexpensive tools or tools from companies that we don't know much about, what are they actually doing with our data? And to be honest most of us are not going to read these massive privacy policies or user agreements that we tend to have to click a box to say that we've read to use the product.Slide 10: Assistive Technology is Becoming InvisiblePresentation: To continue with this theme of simplification, one of the really interesting things we start to see is that the assistive technology or the things that we used to be um we're used to thinking of as assistive technology, they start to kind of become ubiquitous and then they start to kind of become invisible really and that's one of the key maxims of technology really that's been said for a long time. Good technology kind of becomes invisible after a while, we stop thinking about it, stop thinking about that it's there, it just works. Slide 11: Assistive Technology UptakeIdentification of NeedSpecialist hardware and softwareSimplificationMainstream adoption and applicationPresentation: And this is my idea of a very rough model of how assistive technology develops. You tend to get this identification of need, you get specialist hardware and software that gets simplified, refined and so on until eventually we start to see some of these softwares turning up in mainstream applications and I'll give an example of that in terms of what we what we refer to as OCR – Optical Character Recognition or book scanning to make it easierSlide 12: Kurzweil Reading Machine from 1978Image: large machine the size of an office photocopier.Presentation: . This is the first book scanner really that existed um Kurzweil's reading machine which i think you know you'd essentially, I don't know how it works but you'd put the book under a camera and it would read back to you quite crude but incredibly revolutionary at the time. These devices still exist you know really in in some forms and they're still, they're still sold to people that uh just want a device to read their letters or the newspaper and don't want anything more sophisticatedSlide 13: Titled “PC, scanner, software” Image: Desk completely with keyboard, large bulky monitor and large scanner.Presentation: As computing became more mainstream, people started to use their PCs, flatbed scanners for doing scanning and then software became available for us to scan books and format them and create more accessible formats. That's something some of us are familiar with, I used to do a lot of accessible format production and you're essentially taking advantage of two of the mainstream devices and some software to make that work.Slide 14: Titled “One device to do it all!”Image of a smartphone, with a book alongside it. The user is using an app to scan the book.Presentation: Around late 2000s, we had smartphones come in and then suddenly we had one device which could kind of do everything really. We didn't need the PC and the scanner because we had it in just one device especially as the cameras became better and better on the smartphones and you might be able to you might need an app to do it but you'll be able to find an app really easily by going to the app store, the play store, just searching for scanning.Slide 15: Where did the software go?Image: Android smartphone showing the Camera app using the Google Lens service - the text in the picture is extracted automatically.Presentation: And then where we are now um at the moment um Google has developed its camera app so you don't even really need any software/special software to extract text. On the premium google phones at the moment, so the pixel range, Google's lens technology is built in to the camera app so you take a picture and if it's got text in, it'll automatically transcribe it for you anyway so you can copy and paste that out of the picture.And that's not really designed for our kind of uses in terms of you know we might want to scan a book chapter and make it more accessible, it's more designed for I guess Google's own aims of making all information searchable so not just text but images as well, being able to use AI to find out what's going on in pictures and make it that easier for users to find what they need, so this kind of use of OCR it's quite useful if you want to take pictures of a few different pages and then you want to be able to search to find the text that's in those pictures later on or you just want to use it for your own notes as a reminder and copy and paste. It's not really that useful if you want to scan the entire book chapter, it's not really designed for that so there's always going to be that tension between simplifying these technologies and being able to use them for the specific purposes that we need them. So for a student with a print impairment, being able to scan 20 pages really easily and get it into a text format is really important so they would still probably need that specialist software to help them do thatSlide 16: What is Assistive Technology in 2020? Part 1: Access ToolsPresentation: And so as we've seen, a lot of the things that we've always thought of as assisted technology are starting to become more just technology really, they start to become part of mainstream applications and perhaps the identification of them as assistive technology, it's kind of going to move away over the next few years.Slide 17: Microsoft Learning ToolsImmersive Reader open in Microsoft Edge web browserOffice 365 app on a smartphone. The animation shows the user selecting the Read Aloud tool.Presentation: When we think about kind of access tools, text to speech, speech to text, advanced spell checking and so on that we often get provided through DSA, these tools now are starting to become standard features of some of the main mainstream technology platforms. So Microsoft has the immersive reader and it has that in Office 365 it has it in its edge browser, it has it available in some forms in its mobile apps as well so it's phone apps, it's tablet labs and those kind of access tools that were previously the preserve of the kind of software that we get through DSA are now becoming available in these platforms and often in a much simplified form as well.Slide 18: GoogleImages: Dictation in Google Docs. It consists of one icon that hovers above the text.Keyboarding basics screen with instructions on placing your keyboard in front of you.Instructions on finding the correct place for your hands using the horizontal lines on the ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys.Presentation: So moving on from Microsoft to Google. If we use Google docs, we have speech to text available in that, we have text to speech available thereas well and this is actually really hard to kind of show to be honest um but the kind of advanced spell checking that tools like Grammarly and Ginger do are now available in google applications as well so for example here I've got the word "your" instead of "you" and it's corrected that. It will correct those verb tense errors as well really easily and Google has a great advantage and Microsoft to some extent as well in developing these tools just because of the sheer amount of data that it gets back from users that it can feed back into their algorithms.So, its text-to-speech will get better because of the speech-to-text that's being used and all those people dictating into Google docs or Office365 that's helping to improve the different companies. Text-to-speech platforms um spell checking people are checking their spellings every day in google, they're writing into google docs every day and then correcting it and all this is being fed back into the into their learning models and making these applications, making these features better as time goes on and it's quite difficult to compete with that really, I guess for many companies.Slide 19: Google ContinuedImages: Googlemail email composing window, where a phrase is being automatically suggested to the user by Google.Google Duplex service being used on a smartphonePresentation: And here's a couple of examples of where google's use these assistive technologies for its own unique and sometimes perhaps slightly worrying applications so Google has has developed not just word prediction but phrase prediction so as we type um into gmail for example in faint color it comes up with what we might want to want to say and then we press 'tab' and completes it for us. So it's kind of using its technologies to predict what we want to do or say before we say it.The image on the right is difficult to to show this really but google has developed its speech and its uh text to speech technologies so that it can actually ring companies for you or make phonecalls for you. So google can ring a restaurant for you and make a reservation and then get back to you and tell you what time it's made the reservation for, so it's used the text-to-speech and the speech technologies along with its own AI capacities to develop a very unique google style service. I think it's only available in a in America at the moment and I don't think it's actually been taken up that much but it's quite interestingSlide 20: AppleImages: Apple Mac OS system preferences menuScreenshot of IOS accessibility settings menuPresentation: Apple Apple's business is around selling devices so they they were really the first company um to really go all in on providing all these access tools built into the system and mac OS, you've got the text to speech the speech to text the voice over which is the full screen reader for visually impaired users and similarly ios, iphone, ipad OS even their their apple watch has all these technologies built into them from the start.Slide 21: What is Assistive Technology in 2020? Part 2 – Moving ForwardPresentation: So what is assistive technology if then if these kind of access tools start to just become part of the mainstream technology offer?Slide 22: Modern DSA appsImages:PresentPal appEquatio from TextHelp iconClaro Writing Helper iconPresentation: Well I think there has been a movement within DSA over the last few years to more unique applications really alongside the kind of access tools that are provided so just some quick examples; we've got Present Pal which is designed to support people with live presentations and probably wouldn't have been possible really until smartphones, tablets became mainstream. Equatio text app have developed so looking at the text-to-speech speach-to-text and so on that's available for stem subjects and supporting students with that and Claro Writing Helper which is very new so some of you might not have seen yet but it provides one application and one place to support all the tasks related to writing an assignment and students a lot of students will still need the access tools that will give them more customisation and control over their experience so I think those tools will be around for a while yet but as we can see, the assistive technology seems to be a moving target and as some of those access tools become more mainstream we're starting to see more focus again on specialist tools within DSA. And I think the other thing that's really important here as well is the changes that are happening and are coming in higher education as well so we know the government has or wants a lot more focus a lot more people doing stem subjects a lot more focused on vocational training and we we already have students coming in on degree apprenticeships who are very very capable but have often left school when they were 16 so needle need more support and perhaps need different kind of tools than that we've been traditionally providing for DSASlide 23: The Pyramid DiagramImage showing the reversing of the pyramid diagram applied to AT. At the top of the pyramid we have 'specialist hardware and software', in the centre 'user friendly tools', and at the bottom 'accessible platforms'.Presentation: . And this is a slide I used last year in a presentation which just uses that kind of reversing the pyramid theme that we've seen in higher education since the DSA reforms and I think it's really applicable to what's happening in assistive technology too at the moment as well. So we have more DSA use perhaps more for the supply of those specialist hardware and software tools in the middle somewhere we have all those kind of user-friendly access tools um that are extensive and have a lot of customisation options, things that perhaps are provided for DSA but we can provide the site licenses as well on campus and then at the bottom for the inclusive offer we're really focusing on all the all the access tools within the mainstream technology platforms so in Office365, the learning tools, IOS and so onSlide 24: Our Approach at SHUWe exited DSA in 2017 and moved to group sessions for all students.Students: “This is great. How can I use it at home?”Presentation: Just to talk briefly about our approach at Sheffield Hallam which I think has influenced my perspective quite a bit I mean we exited DSA in 2017 and we stopped doing one-to-one um training through disabled students allowance, AT training and we moved to doing group sessions to all students. And I mean yeah students that came to the sessions love the tools particularly mind mapping and recording software and you know they would often say it's great but how can I use it at home? And we don't really have answers for that at the moment for some for some assistive technology and it gets that crux again of what people expect from software, they don't expect just to use it on one computer or in one place, they expect to be able to use it everywhere.Slide 25: The Present and Future Pre-CovidMicrosoft and Office 365 Learning ToolsMobile Tools (Sonocent Link)Apps Anywhere (Audio Notetaker, Mindview)Assistive Technology Inductions for disabled studentsLockdown and BeyondSessions and Inductions on products available to students at homeAll sessions via ZoomThe Extended Campus – AT should be available everywherePresentation: Pre-pandemic that influence does more to go towards looking at things like the Office365 learning tools and the Microsoft learning tools for those basic access tools because all our students get Office365 subscriptions when they enroll um focusing on things like mobile tools so we have audio note taker but really they can get some link as well as the app on the mobile device and that's really something they can use anywhere rather than having to come into university to use and we have these tools on what we use as apps anywhere which is the software delivery system that's used on campus so students can use software while they're on campus. We hope eventually that that will work off campus for students as well but there's lots of technicalities there in terms of licensing and things like that and it's working through those problems of you know having software that was designed for the desktop era and expanding it out to the way that we use technology today and we offer assistive technology inductions for disabled students as well. So we offer the group sessions for all students but for disabled students we're able to offer appointments where we can explore and guide them to find out what kind of assistive technology is suitable for them before they go through the DSA process. And from the lock down and beyond this process has kind of intensified we've been able to get some of our software temporarily available for students to use on their own devices, we're doing all our sessions through Zoom which has actually improved our spring and summer take-up and um you know improved attendance and things like that and we're working towards what we've got now now at SHU which is this extended campus model for the next year or so where everything that's been available traditionally on campus and we're trying to make available off campus as wellSlide 26: What it means for usAT may be available from day one of a student’s courseStudents are often already AT users as they arriveChange is often rapid and unexpectedWe can move from a ‘gatekeeper’ to ‘guide’ rolePresentation: So to conclude, I think there are some key points that we can take from this; there's a lot of change happening in technology and assistive technology which can be quite scary but also very exciting and liberating for our students as well. The fact that students have access to text -to-speech/speech-to-text from their first day on campus or perhaps even before is really really exciting as a development and will really help us to improve take-up of these technologies.And I think as well, students, they'll often have been using this assistive technology before they arrive so they won't be waiting for their DSA assessment or their guidance appointments to find out about the technology, they may be coming in and you know they may potentially know more than us when they arrive and they may have been using assistive technology and forms which it's not really marketed as assistive technology so they don't even see it as that, they just see it as tools to support them again going back to things like Grammarly and Ginger. I think we have to get used to very constant change and expected change sometimes with assistive technology um as the applications and the technologies we use can update themselves and refine themselves slightly, remove things that are not being used, add new things, it's it's much more of a challenge to keep up and keep our resources up to date and support the students who might struggle with constant changes to user interfaces or technologies or features.We can't just expect these technologies to stay the same for one, two, three years. I think finally as well um many of us working with assistive technologies, we can start to move from a kind of gatekeeper role that we've always had. Perhaps as assessors or assistive technology advisors to more of a guide role, where we're talking about what kind of technologies available on different platforms, what kind of free even inexpensive apps are available for students to use and I think as well we can be finding out and learn ourselves from the students about what kind of strategies they've been using with technology to support their studies and that's been happening for a few years now I think for a lot of usSlide 27: Thanks for WatchingEmail: r.m.nind@shu.ac.ukPresentation: so anyway that's it thank you for watching um if you've got any comments or questions feel free to give me an email directly. I probably won't get back to you until late August as I'm on annual leave now but I'd certainly love to hear from you. So again thanks and take care and goodbye. ................
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