The Right to Assistive Technology and Accessible Instructional Materials for U.S. Students Does Not Consistently Translate into Predictable Access and Effective Use.

Students in the United States have federally-established rights regarding access to assistive technology (AT) devices and services, yet those rights are not consistently upheld for a variety of reasons acknowledged in the literature. We conducted a interview-based study with 48 education professionals, family members and students to analyze the facilitators and barriers that influence AT access for students in the State of Delaware. Study results were consistent with the extant literature, and revealed numerous violations of student rights guaranteed under U.

Engagement with electronic screen media among students with autism spectrum disorders.

This study investigated the relative engagement potential of four types of electronic screen media (ESM): animated video, video of self, video of a familiar person engaged with an immersive virtual reality (VR) game, and immersion of self in the VR game. Forty-two students with autism, varying in age and expressive communication ability, were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. Gaze duration and vocalization served as dependent measures of engagement.

Moving targets: the effect of animation on identification of action word representations.

This study examined the conditions under which action representations - presented in both static and dynamic formats - were most readily identified. Preschoolers without disabilities selected graphics corresponding to a spoken word from a computerized four-choice array. Although pre-tests confirmed that the children had all of the stimulus words in their lexical repertoires, their demonstration of that knowledge when the stimuli were presented in graphical form was less robust.