Saturday, August 15, 2015

Assistive Technologies in the Chrome Browser

The school districts I work with in Riverside County take many different approaches to selecting devices for their students. When they ask for my recommendation, I generally suggest iPads for grades K-2 and Chromebooks for grades 3-12. There are many reasons behind that recommendation - cost, ease of management, touch and interactivity, and personalization. But one of the most important reasons is the ability of both of those types of devices to be adaptive and assistive. For this blog post I am going to discuss some of the assistive characteristics of Google's Chrome browser. While the assignment was to discuss the accessibility of the computer that I use, I decided to focus on the browser itself. At home I use a Mac desktop machine. At work I use a Windows desktop, a Chromebook, and a Mac laptop. The common thread is that I use Chrome almost exclusively on all four of those devices.
Accessibility Extensions from the Chrome Web Store

Extensions loaded on my Chrome browser





According to Roblyer (2016), providing students who have physical, sensory, or communication impairments with some assistive technology is not just a good practice, it is implicit in the 1997 federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Below are some of the capabilities of the Chrome browser that can assist students with special needs:

OpenDyslexic is a Chrome extension that formats pages with a special font and paragraph highlighting designed to help students with dyslexia focus and decipher text.

Before OpenDyslexic
With OpenDyslexic
Clearly (by Evernote) can help students with attention deficits read pages more easily by removing distracting images, ads, and multiple pages.

Google Voice Search allows students with physical impairments or language issues that make it difficult to type to do research on Google by speaking their search questions directly into the computer.
High Contrast

High Contrast is a Chrome extension that can help students with certain visual impairments read pages more easily by converting the view to white text on a black background causing the text to really pop off the page.

Google's Image Alt Text Viewer helps visually impaired students read pages by replacing images with their descriptive text. Then a page reader will be able to include image descriptions instead of just skipping the images.

ChromeVox is a browser extension that reads pages to students who may have specific vision, learning, or language issues. This extension was designed by Google specifically to meet the needs of visually impaired users.

Roblyer, M.D. (2016). Integrating educational technology into teaching (7th Ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
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1 comment:

Elissa Kirkland said...

I think suggesting iPads is a great idea for the lower grades and Chromebooks for the upper. Upper grade students need to get used to using laptops more and more. The more practice they have with this, the better equipped they will be for the real world. iPads work well with younger students because they haven't developed their word processing and typing skills. I like that you chose to focus on the browser because many of us use that browser no matter what device we use. I use chrome on my iPad quite often. Since many of my students report having dyslexia, I am intrigued to use OpenDyslexic with my students. I use clearly a lot myself and need to use it with my students. I haven't had my students practice using the chromebooks much yet. This is something I am working on. Thank you for all of the wonderful tools that I can begin with my students. I am hoping to be able to check the chromebooks out in the next week or two and use some of these tools with them. I plan on spending several days logging on and adding applications to their browsers. I want them to try out the tools to see if they would or would not be helpful for them. I will teach them how to delete tools they don't want to use.

August 15, 2015 at 5:50 PM

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