Audio description is a service aimed at widening accessibility to visual media such as film and television for all individuals, especially for people with sensory disabilities. It offers people who are blind or have low vision "a verbal screen onto the world" (Di´az Cintas, Orero, & Remael, 2007, p. 13). The standard rule when…

Despite the trend for mainstreaming children with cochlear implants (CI), a considerable number, either with or without additional disabilities, attend schools for the deaf today. The purpose of this study was to address approaches and practices, interdisciplinary involvement, and challenges within schools for the deaf for managing the…

Background: Many children with cerebral palsy learn to use technology to access their environments and communicate; however, minimal research informs practice. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study with purposive sampling recruited 10 therapists (occupational, speech, and physiotherapists) from one early intervention service. Data were…

Following the establishment of newborn hearing screening programs, age of identification and length of time before receiving interventions has been reduced for children, including those with milder degrees of hearing loss who were previously not identified until school age. This population of early-identified children requires new support programs…

Although once placed solely in deaf schools, a growing number of deaf students in Sweden are now enrolling in mainstream schools. In order to maintain a functional educational environment for these students, municipalities are required to provide a variety of supporting resources, e.g. technological equipment and specialized personnel. However,…

This study aimed to determine what the best practice guidelines were for making academic reading material available to visually impaired students at the University of Pretoria (UP) easily and efficiently. A basic literature review of relevant research data was done to help create further context for this study. A semi-structured interview with a…

This article investigates how normative attitudes about work construct barriers to workers who are blind and visually impaired. The researcher collected narratives about rhetorical experiences from blind and visually impaired participants in the United States and analyzed accounts of these workplace interactions to identify rhetorical commonplaces…

Visually impaired students, despite access to technology resources, experience difficulties in succeeding in higher education due to ineffective technology resource implementation and a lack of adequate assistive technology instruction. The purpose of this qualitative interview-based study was to determine barriers to assistive technology…

Assistive technology is defined by the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) of 2004 as "any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of a child with a disability"…

As stated in Cardoso, Smith, and Garcia Fuentes (2015), second language researchers and practitioners have explored the pedagogical capabilities of Text-To-Speech synthesizers (TTS) for their potential to enhance the acquisition of writing (e.g. Kirstein, 2006), vocabulary and reading (e.g. Proctor, Dalton, & Grisham, 2007), and pronunciation…

This study applied speech-to-text recognition (STR) technology to assist non-native English-speaking participants to learn at a seminar given in English. How participants used transcripts generated by the STR technology for learning and their perceptions toward the STR were explored. Three main findings are presented in this study. Most…

The use of technology is becoming widespread in science and technology classes due to its overwhelming benefits in learning. Yet many English language teachers lack knowledge of the existing technologies and the 'know-how' to use it in the classroom. In this paper, the researchers report the pilot study conducted to explore the effects of virtual…

The functional curriculum is a beneficial curriculum for education students with intellectual disabilities. Special education teachers have transitioned from spending most of their academic time using the functional curriculum to spending more time teaching the additional academic content material. There are numerous research studies focusing on…

A single participant phenomenological study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis can give voice to a student with vision impairment, exploring and developing our understanding of the experience of schooling. This article focuses on the school experience of a senior school student with vision impairment. Few studies have looked at school…

Extensive research emphasises the importance of parental involvement for children's learning and academic achievement. This paper reports from a Norwegian study researching parents' experiences on follow-up after their child's cochlear implantation. Within this context, parental involvement is suggested to be of major importance for the child's…