Mobile Assistive Technologies

Mobile assistive technology includes portable mobile technology devices (e.g., e-readers, smartphones, tablets, personal media players) and associated software applications (apps) used to support the learning and functional needs of persons with disabilities (e.g., sensory, communication, physical, cognitive). These mobile technologies compensate for or improve someone’s ability to do something he or she otherwise would have accomplished with great difficulty, ineffectively—or not at all. This entry discusses how mobile assistive technologies can help students with disabilities, the statutory foundations of mobile assistive technologies, and features and uses of mobile assistive technologies.

To understand how mobile technology can help a student with disabilities, consider a high school student with dyslexia who must read a science chapter for her biology class, outline key ideas, and post questions to classmates on the class Moodle site (virtual learning platform). She uses a mobile tablet with a text-to-speech app (e.g., Voice Dream Reader) that converts the electronic files from the digital copy of the book chapter on bioethics into simulated speech. To efficiently follow along, she adjusts the speaking rate in the app so that as the content is read aloud she can follow along comfortably while the words are highlighted on the screen. This multimodal input helps her attend to and remember the vocabulary and ideas in the chapter. She is able to pause the app (and return to an earlier section of the chapter) while she writes down key ideas from the chapter. Without these supports, her reading is labored and taxing, with gaps in comprehension.

Mobile assistive technology is one class of assistive technology (AT), the broader umbrella term for a range of devices and tools that address functional skill needs because of a disability. When mobile devices are considered a kind of assistive technology, decisions about the best fit of a particular tool are made at an individual level. Services needed to evaluate, acquire, train, maintain, or repair assistive mobile technologies are also covered by the term mobile assistive technology.

Technology use in education for students with disabilities is broader. The U.S. Department of Education reports that most students with disabilities in K–12 education are educated for most of their school day in a general education setting with other students. Technology-oriented pedagogies used in schools are especially important for students with disabilities. Some of these include one-to-one technology programs (provision of one digital or computing device per student for learning) and mobile learning (access to educational tools, resources, and information using mobile devices). Mobile technology use also supports universal design for learning, or UDL (a framework for proactive design of flexible curriculum and instruction addressing wide learner variability). David Rose and colleagues discuss the complementary and unique aspects of AT and UDL, which together improve education and success for students with disabilities.

Mainstream mobile technologies (mobile technologies readily available for general use and not designed solely for individuals with disabilities), such as tablets and smartphones, now include many accessibility features. Some of these include word prediction (software or device-generated word choices based on the first or [Page 512]second letter(s) typed by the user), text to speech (conversion of digital text to audible speech), and screen magnification (customized enlargement of screen display). This class of technologies is referred to as accessible technology. Distinctions between technologies currently designated as assistive and technologies with accessibility features that are used more generally are likely to become more blurred as technologies evolve.

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