What is Assistive Tech
The lowdown on AT
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Further information on AT
AT promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to or changed methods of interacting with the technology needed to accomplish such tasks.
Likewise, disability advocates point out that technology is often created without regard to people with disabilities, creating unnecessary barriers to hundreds of millions of people.
Assistive Technology Products
Telecare
Telecare is a particular sort of assistive technology that uses electronic sensors connected to an alarm system to help caregivers manage risk and help vulnerable people stay independent at home longer. An example would be the systems being put in place for senior people such as fall detectors, thermometers (for hypothermia risk), flooding and unlit gas sensors (for people with mild dementia). Notably, these alerts can be customized to the particular person's risks. When the alert is triggered, a message is sent to a carer or contact centre who can respond appropriately.
Technology similar to Telecare can also be used to act within a person's home rather than just to respond to a detected crisis. Using one of the examples above, gas sensors for people with dementia can be used to trigger a device that turns off the gas and tells someone what has happened.
Designing for people with dementia is a good example of how the design of the interface of a piece of AT is critical to its usefulness. People with dementia or any other identified user group must be involved in the design process to make sure that the design is accessible and usable. In the example above, a voice message could be used to remind the person with dementia to turn off the gas himself, but whose voice should be used, and what should the message say? Questions like these must be answered through user consultation, involvement and evaluation.
Accessible Computer Input
Sitting at a desk with a QWERTY keyboard and a mouse remains the dominant way of interacting with a personal computer. Some Assistive Technology reduces the strain of this way of work through ergonomic accessories with height-adjustable furniture, footrests, wrist rests, and arm supports to ensure correct posture. Keyguards fit over the keyboard to help prevent unintentional keypresses.
Alternatively, Assistive Technology may attempt to improve the ergonomics of the devices themselves:
Ergonomic keyboards reduce the discomfort and strain of typing.
Chorded keyboards have a handful of keys (one per digit per hand) to type by ‘chords’ which produce different letters and keys.
Expanded keyboards with larger, more widely-spaced keys.
Compact and miniature keyboards.
Dvorak and other alternative layouts may offer more ergonomic layouts of the keys[citation needed]. There are also variants of Dvorak in which the most common keys are located at either the left or right side of the keyboard.
Input devices may be modified to make them easier to see and understand:
Keyboards with lowercase keys
Keyboards with big keys.
Large print keyboard with high contrast colors (such as white on black, black on white, and black on ivory).
Large print adhesive keyboard stickers in high contrast colors (such as white on black, black on white, and black on yellow).
Embossed locator dots help find the ‘home’ keys, F and J, on the keyboard.
Scroll wheels on mice remove the need to locate the scrolling interface on the computer screen.
Footmouse - Foot-operated mouse.
More ambitiously, and quite crucially when keyboard or mouse prove unusable, AT can also replace the keyboard and mouse with alternative devices such as the LOMAK keyboard, trackballs, joysticks, graphics tablets, touchpads, touch screens, foot mice, a microphone with speech recognition software, sip-and-puff input, switch access, and vision-based input devices.
Software can also make input devices easier to use:
Keyboard shortcuts and MouseKeys allow the user to substitute keyboarding for mouse actions. Macro recorders can greatly extend the range and sophistication of keyboard shortcuts.
Sticky keys allows characters or commands to be typed without having to hold down a modifier key (Shift, Ctrl, Alt) while pressing a second key. Similarly, ClickLock is a Microsoft Windows feature that remembers a mouse button is down so that items can be highlighted or dragged without holding the mouse button down throughout.
Customization of mouse or mouse alternatives' responsiveness to movement, double-clicking, and so forth.
ToggleKeys is a feature of Microsoft Windows 95 onwards. A high sound is heard when the CAPS LOCK, SCROLL LOCK, or NUM LOCK key is switched on and a low sound is heard when any of those keys are switched off.
Customization of pointer appearance, such as size, color and shape.
Predictive text
Spell checkers and grammar checkers
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