Online education has the ability of going beyond. It is a powerful method to empower the students in a new way enabling them towards a newer future with brighter aspects. The students are motivated and are stuck more to education because of its interesting features. With online education, our civilisation is witnessing the first ray of light of the dawn of the new age. Its capacity is well understood when we witness how it is helping the students with disabilities to dive deeper into the sea of education.
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Let’s look at how online education aims to educate the students with disabilities:
The modern approach of online education
The Braille note taker is a machine that comes with a stiff appearance of a box in black. It looks like a laptop although the keyboards of a normal laptop are replaced with one key for each finger. It lacks a screen and the fingers can be run over the strip of bumps small in size. Letters and numbers are represented by these. It is introduced to the students in the Wright State University.
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Charles Hiser, a student of the university, says that it is really easy to navigate once the learner gets familiar with the system. It is evident as he says “Different letters jump by different elements,” he explains. “V jumps by visited links. H jumps by heading. G jumps by graphic. F jumps by forms field. So on and so forth. You can jump by a whole bunch of different things.”
Read to learn
The note taker has the software support of the screen reader that reads out the contents for helping the students in education. The screen reader software allows the students to get the syllabus in the online medium and can also read it without the help of someone else.
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The problem
The problem of this system is that it is really time consuming. Using such technology the students will not be able to take a glance at an entire web page and will not also be able to spot the desired thing. The students, then, may have to hear the very link and line of the text to understand the contents of the page. Sometimes although the file is found, it can turn out to be unreadable by the software.
Higher education strives to reach the students
Higher education desperately endeavours to make the virtual world more acceptable to the learners.
In the mean time, the advocacy groups are also in the process to sue the universities having digital material that cannot be accessed. They recently targeted Harvard and MIT.
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Technology from its side is also evolving to meet the continuous demands of the learners eager for education. It is also closing in the documents that are hard to read.
Technology offers the solution
Ken Petri, director of the Web Accessibility Center at The Ohio State University.
“One of the things that I think has gotten a lot better is the acceptance of students with disabilities as just regular learners. Faculty generally get less nervous now. A blind student registers for a class, it’s not a huge panic.”
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So, technology offers the solution to almost all of the educational problems that are acting as a hindrance to the students. The students with disabilities have the same right to education as the regular learners have and technology is offering this at their doorstep. Getting affordable online degree programs are no longer unreachable. The intention of following it will prove what education means to them.
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