The Student News Site of Colorado State University

The Rocky Mountain Collegian

The Student News Site of Colorado State University

The Rocky Mountain Collegian

The Student News Site of Colorado State University

The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Print Edition
Letter to the editor submissions
Have a strong opinion about something happening on campus or in Fort Collins? Want to respond to an article written on The Collegian? Write a Letter to the Editor by following the guidelines here.
Follow Us on Twitter
Crypto Exchange Listing: Types of Exchanges and Compliance Requirements
March 25, 2024

The crypto industry continues to evolve, fueled by the increasing institutional adoption of crypto. Today, numerous companies are entering the...

Assistive technology more vital than ever in an online world

Struggling with technology is a common joke, but for some it can be a true barrier to learning and functioning in an online environment. 

At Colorado State University, the Assistive Technology Resource Center provides opportunities for students and employees with disabilities to thrive in the university setting. 

Ad

“(Our role) is to meet legal mandates, ensuring that a student’s educational opportunities are equitable, and students with a disability are (equal) to those that don’t have a disability,” said Marla Roll, the ATRC director and an assistant professor in the department of occupational therapy. “Moving beyond compliance, we try to foster a technology environment that is inclusive for everybody.”

To gain access to the ATRC, students with disabilities must first consult with the Student Disability Center, according to the ATRC website. At the SDC, students will go through an accommodations process, where they will provide documentation of their disability, meet with a specialist and determine the accommodations that best fit their needs. 

In an email to The Collegian, the SDC wrote that they focus less on a student’s diagnosis and more on the barriers the student encounters. 

“If we think they could benefit from working with ATRC we will refer them at that point,” the SDC wrote. “After that, it is up to the student to reach out to the ATRC and make an appointment and begin that process.” 

The SDC wrote that if the student has to wait more than a week or two to get an appointment at the ATRC, the SDC’s Coordinator of Accessible Text can provide the student with PDF formats of their textbooks and give them information about text-to-speech features. 

Roll said that while the ATRC provides both hardware and software assistive technology for students and employees, she sees that literacy support tools that allow students to interact with content, particularly Read&Write and Kurzweil 3000, are used the most.

Moving beyond compliance, we try to foster a technology environment that is inclusive for everybody.”-Marla Roll, ATRC director

Those softwares offer services such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text, text and picture dictionaries, highlighting tools to create summaries and adjustments to the display settings on documents.

“The really powerful thing is you see (the text), and you hear it read at the same time, so kind of multimodal learning,” Roll said. “(It) can be something simple like you need more white space on the page or you need to get rid of harsh white backgrounds. … There’s just a variety of reasons reading can be challenging, and I think that’s especially true of a lot of reading online.”

ATRC administrative assistant Chelsea Hansen said that note-taking assistive technology is widely used, and the assistive technology rooms in the Morgan Library are popular as well.

Ad

Hansen said assistive technology and advocacy is important to create a bottom line of accessibility for all students. 

“I think raising awareness wherever (students) can is a great way of doing that,” Hansen said. “It’s important to know that accessibility benefits everyone, it’s not just about people with disabilities who will benefit from universal design.”

The ATRC also offers online accessibility support, with tips on how to make Canvas pages, PowerPoints and other class documents accessible to all students.   

“The content has to be accessible for the assistive technology to work well,” Roll said. “So there’s a correlation between accessibility and effective use of those tools.”

Roll said that all PDF files in their raw form read just like an image file, so for students who are using text-to-speech software or for blind students who need to use screen readers, the content inside the PDF is inaccessible. 

To fix this, Roll explained, the ATRC can train faculty on how to do optical character recognition, which turns a PDF into readable, searchable text. 

“What I’ve seen, which I think is a positive … with this move to all online, it really elevated the topic of accessibility,” Roll said. “All of a sudden, everybody is online and (thinking), ‘Gosh, what do I do to make sure that online content is going to work for all of my students?’ … I think in the big scheme, like long-term picture, it’s going to change the way people teach and put content together because once you start doing it, it becomes part of your workflow.”

Serena Bettis can be reached at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @serenaroseb.

Leave a Comment
More to Discover
About the Contributor
Serena Bettis, Editor in Chief
Serena Bettis is your 2022-23 editor in chief and is in her final year studying journalism and political science. In her three years at The Collegian, Bettis has also been a news reporter, copy editor, news editor and content managing editor, and she occasionally takes photos, too. When Bettis was 5, her family moved from Iowa to a tiny town northwest of Fort Collins called Livermore, Colorado, before eventually moving to Fort Collins proper. When she was 8 years old, her dad enrolled at Colorado State University as a nontraditional student veteran, where he found his life's passion in photojournalism. Although Bettis' own passion for journalism did not stem directly from her dad, his time at CSU and with The Collegian gave her the motivation to bite down on her fear of talking to strangers and find The Collegian newsroom on the second day of classes in 2019. She's never looked back since. Considering that aforementioned fear, Bettis is constantly surprised to be where she is today. However, thanks to the supportive learning environment at The Collegian and inspiring peers, Bettis has not stopped chasing her teenage dream of being a professional journalist. Between working with her section editors, coordinating news stories between Rocky Mountain Student Media departments and coaching new reporters, Bettis gets to live that dream every day. When she's not in the newsroom or almost falling asleep in class, you can find Bettis working in the Durrell Marketplace and Café or outside gazing at the beauty that is our campus (and running inside when bees are nearby). This year, Bettis' goals for The Collegian include continuing its trajectory as a unique alt-weekly newspaper, documenting the institutional memory of the paper to benefit students in years to come and fostering a sense of community and growth both inside the newsroom and through The Collegian's published work. Bettis would like to encourage anyone with story ideas, suggestions, questions, concerns or comments to reach out to her at editor@collegian.com.

Comments (0)

When commenting on The Collegian’s website, please be respectful of others and their viewpoints. The Collegian reviews all comments and reserves the right to reject comments from the website. Comments including any of the following will not be accepted. 1. No language attacking a protected group, including slurs or other profane language directed at a person’s race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social class, age, physical or mental disability, ethnicity or nationality. 2. No factually inaccurate information, including misleading statements or incorrect data. 3. No abusive language or harassment of Collegian writers, editors or other commenters. 4. No threatening language that includes but is not limited to language inciting violence against an individual or group of people. 5. No links.
All The Rocky Mountain Collegian Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *