Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) have been used in education
since mid-1990s. The goals of each implementation vary, but in general,
many of these efforts are focused on the incorporation of lab-type
activities into a traditional classroom setting or the enhancement
of instructor-student interaction in the classroom. The technology
and infrastructure resources necessary for computing labs are often
cost prohibitive for educational institutions. Some educators see
PDA’s as a viable alternative to either supplement or augment
the lab portion of a particular learning experience. The use of PDA’s,
particularly with recent wireless and mobile technology developments,
also provides a new forum for promoting student and educator interaction
in the classroom.
PDA’s are known to provide benefits to people with disabilities
in many ways. Most of these benefits are related to organizational
and task management functions of the PDA’s. In addition, the
portability of these devices provides a significant benefit to people
with mobility impairments.
On the other hand, PDA’s may act as a barrier rather than a
solution for students with disabilities. People with cognitive impairments,
manual dexterity loss, audio and visual deficiencies are the most
affected by some of the features of existent PDA’s that may
hinder accessibility to the user. Significant observations and recommendations
about accessibility issues for PDA’s have been addressed in
the past by different higher education institutions, manufacturers,
and independent organizations. Some of these important reviews about
PDA accessibility can be found on the links to the left.
In addition, OSU Technology Access Program has also presented important
observations in this regard. The most important considerations for
PDA’s enhancements are related to customization capabilities.
People should be able to change features on PDA’s in order to
get a major level of consistency while interfacing with the devices.
A greater level of redundancy is also desired. For example, a significant
improvement would be enabling the user to change color schemes and
screen sizes according to his/her accommodation. Color schemes can
be coded in a specific way to denote logical steps while using the
PDA’s. Another features that would be customized are audio alerts.
Adding different tones that denote different actions performed is
a good practice to increment redundancy and make PDA’s accessible
for people with visual disabilities. A way to get this is implementing
different sounds related to relative positions in the LCD of the PDA.
According to OSU Technology Access Program, special effort has to
be put on decreasing the complexity of menus that are displayed on
PDA’s. People with cognitive impairments would be beneficiated
from a logical sequence of menus. A hierarchical structure would be
most useful in this case.
Magnification is another technique that can be used to help people
with visual deficiencies. The user would be able to change both text
and icons to appropriate dimensions according with his/her perception
and discrimination thresholds. This would make easier to the user
the performance of different tasks.
Fortunately, OSU Technology Access Program did not find any force
issues related with the keys of the stylus while performing operations
on the PDA’s. This should not be a major concern for people
with manual dexterity loss.
Finally, it is important to talk about external applications that
can be attached to PDA’s. These external applications are designed
to help people to use the PDA’s (i.e. keyboards attached to
PDA’s). Personal Digital Assistants should be equipped with
standard USB ports and serial ports to provide that connectivity.
Other external devices that can be used are speech recognition units,
magnification screens, keyboards, etc.
