A-Tech Review

Assistive Technology and Mental Health

At this moment of horror and grief, I don't have answers. Just a question.

How can assistive technology help with our mental health challenge?

We already have many great tools for learning disabilities, such as Inspiration.

We need more tools for other mental health problems.

We need computer tools to assist in diagnosis. We need Internet tools to link people to the help they need. We need computer tools to assist in whatever remediation is possible.

Technology for Kids with LD

A blogger at Yahoo 360 has posted about technology for kids with learning disabilities.

I wish to comment on that here because I actually have some experience in this area.

Our daughter (right) was born with dyslexia. It was diagnosed at age 7. When she was 3, I remember sitting her down before a game called "Fun With Letters and Words", having her hit the keys and watch letters and words appear on a DOS screen. I never connected the dots. She would hit the same key again-and-again, she would finish a level and then repeat it, again-and-again. Something wasn't getting through.

The Importance of PDF Equalizer

One of the most important bits of assistive technology around may be PDF Equalizer. It's from Premier Assistive, which has been in business since 1998.

As the name implies this is a tool for dealing with Adobe PDF files. PDFs are commonly used for reports posted on the Web, and in electronic books.

One of the big problems with PDFs is that they're highly complex. They don't have to be linear like book pages. They can have nested charts, links, dependencies of all sorts. These are quickly apparent to those with sight, but to those without it's not so obvious.

So it's not enough that software support reading the text of a PDF to you. If it just does that, you've lost most of the meaning. Given the technical nature of many PDF documents, plain reading won't really help you.

So PDF Equalizer does a whole lot more.

Fast Help for Disabled Learners

People who teach kids with disabilities, whether physical, intellectual, or merely learning, have a tough time coming up with aids they know will work, in-time to use them.

There are, when you break it down, so many things that people must learn to be successful -- reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking -- and teachers are really given very little time to teach it all because most kids pick it all up naturally, and only have to be presented the information in order to get going.