Learning Disabilities and Office Environments

["Steve Noble" <steven@dessci.com>]

After today's call, I thought I might address this by way of email. This
topic has come up a few times on some of our calls. It might be good for
us to define exactly what we want to know. 

I think the general idea is that we would like to know what specific
"work space" issues are at work for people with learning disabilities
and other cognitive problems. Most of the research I have seen seems to
center on students with learning disabilities being able to access
static documents and other information resources, but some materials do
consider the needs of students needing to create their own materials. I
know of very little research that lends itself to designing better word
processing applications for adults with learning disabilities who are
working in an office setting, which is probably the setting we have in
mind. I don't know if that is an area that the 508 refresh group is
looking into, but Mike would surely know something about that.

One thing we could do is to extend concepts used by educators using
existing office document capabilities to make sure these are supported
in ODF. For instance, here's a representative document on the
SchwabLearning website...
"Making the Most of Standard Technology to Enhance Learning"
http://www.schwablearning.org/articles.aspx?r=1118

This article mentions the following points:
* User changeable font style
* User changeable font size
* User changeable font color
* User changeable background color
* User changeable line spacing
* Edit by breaking text into shorter paragraphs
* Edit by adding short summaries into the text flow
* AT support for synthetic speech
* AT support for sync highlighting
* User ability to color code portions of the text with different color
highlighting
* User ability to search text by user added color code highlighting
* User ease of cut and paste
* Creator ease of connecting a dictionary
* User ease of looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary
* User ease of ability to convert docs to MP3 files for use in iPods,
etc.

So these might be things to see if we have the necessary hooks to
support in ODF.

Also, there's a nice NCDAE article on designing web content for people
with cognitive disabilities, with references to research to back it up.
By extension, many of these points will apply to office documents.
"Cognitive Disabilities and the Web: Where Accessibility and Usability
Meet?"
http://ncdae.org/tools/cognitive/
Another useful background document...
http://www.webaim.org/articles/cognitive/conceptualize/

Finally, I would a lot with the folks at CAST, so if we think we would
like a more formal review by an outside professional I could ask Chuck
Hitchcock if he could offer any suggestions.

I think someone (maybe Mike) was going to ask the Kurzweil folks for
their feedback, which would be good. Beyond that, if anyone has input on
what direction we would like to pursue we could discuss this further. I
can step up to the plate and handle the LD stuff since I do have
background in that area.

Best regards,

Steve Noble
Director of Accessibility Policy
Design Science, Inc.
E-mail: SteveN@DesSci.com
Phone: (502) 969-3088
http://www.dessci.com/accessibility