An Example: Sacred Heart University - Equity of Access: Adaptive Technology - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Frances S. Grodzinsky

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An Example: Sacred Heart University

I became interested in adaptive technology through contact with several students at Sacred Heart University (Fairfield, Connecticut, USA) who were physically challenged. One young woman had such severe arthritis that she could barely type at the traditional keyboard – in a class that was 50% “hands-on”! I also had two visually-impaired students, one who needed a personal assistant to type in his programs and write out his examinations, and another who could not perform the laboratory assignments because she could read neither the assignment nor the computer screen. I have also had students whose wheelchairs would not fit underneath traditional computer worktables. This was a very troubling situation. There were many obstacles to a “normal” university education for these students. What message were we sending? While certain accommodations were being made, they seemed inadequate in a university that advertised dormitories which were “fully wired” for computing.

Although adaptive technology tools existed, we, as a university, did not have them. Why not? The answer seemed obvious: we were designing our university education for able-bodied, non-learning-disabled students. Were we showing “user bias”? Brey defines user biases in computer systems as features of their design that work against the interests of some or all of their users. (6) I would like to extend this analogy to the design of university education. Selective user biases disadvantage only some users of a system, and our students with disabilities were clearly at a disadvantage in terms of computer access. They did not fit the profile of an “ideal” or “normal” user and were therefore excluded and selectively burdened by choices of the university. Until universities make adaptive technology available for their students with disabilities, they will be guilty of user bias.

Why, then, have many universities not made adaptive technology available? I believe that universities in general are not sensitive to the needs of their students with disabilities. In fact, many shy away from recruiting such students because of the extra financial burden it might place on the institution. For that reason, adaptive technology is not common on most university campuses across the country. It costs money to equip and maintain computer laboratories. Convincing a university to provide special technology for a small fraction of its population is not easy, although it may be the morally correct thing to do. One could, however, make the financial argument that, balanced against increased revenue from tuition, the cost of software and hardware to make computers useful to students with disabilities is minimal. And the number of students with disabilities who are studying or want to study at universities is increasing. At Sacred Heart, for example, with a population of approximately 1,800 full-time undergraduates, in two years the number of documented students with disabilities who need adaptive technology services more than doubled from 45 to 105; and many more students began to use the university learning center (ULC) on a regular basis. It is difficult to gather precise statistics on the number of students with disabilities, because it is against the law to seek out such students for identification purposes. They must identify themselves to university officials.

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