iPad seen as great tool for kids with disabilities
April 12th, 2010
From the [Toronto] Globe and Mail:
Parents and educators of kids with developmental disabilities offer high praise for the new Apple iPad. They say it can serve as an assisted communication device, can help kids focus on routine tasks, and is a great help at easing student anxiety.
“It’s just a game changer,” says Samuel Sennott, co-creator of the popular Proloquo2Go software. “It’s … [a] portable, table-top solution for people with physical impairments, people with visual impairments.”
Sennott’s speech-generating software, currently ranked at number 34 in the United States among more than 185,000 available apps, is available in an iPad version.
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July 1st, 2010 at 10:02 am
My son Alec loves loves his iPad and his iPhone!
The heat based touch enables him to communicate more freely with his friends, watch movies in transit, or to hear a written word that he might not know as he reads alone in his apartment. Alec, 27, has DS, and is also a mad texter on his iPhone! If he spells a word incorrectly, we quietly text the correct spelling back. This creates an electronic spelling list for him to refer back to for future texts. So great! The iPad & iPhone would have been a terrific asset for Alec in his classroom settings as a fully included student in our local high school. I had Alec show it to a mom of a 6 month old baby with DS the other day. We told the mom how lucky her little guy was and to get an iPad for him on his first birthday!
April 12th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
The iPad needs alternative input devices to really allow people with developmental disabilities to use it as a communication device. Any ideas on how we can do head pointing or switch selection with the iPad? Shouldn’t be hard, right?