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As a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the early 1990s, Patrick Burke would write a paper on a clunky laptop that would read the words aloud as he typed. But if he were still in school today, the process would be much different: Burke, who lost his sight as an infant, would dictate his paper to his iPhone, transmit it to his computer and then format it.
As adaptive technology for students with disabilities changes, the applications once used on desktop or laptop computers are increasingly shifting to mobile devices. Not only are college student reading their electronic textbooks on smartphones, but they are also downloading apps that can convert website texts or Word documents into speech. “It’s a cultural change,” says Burke, now the coordinator of the Disabilities and Computing Program at UCLA. “I think that mobile technology is going to be the way things will go on from here.”
