Cutting-edge assistive technology

For disabled students at Baruch College, classes can be a challenge. However, with the cutting-edge technology and training provided by Baruch College's Office of Services for Students with Disabilities, disabled students have accesses to tools to succeed in the classroom.

Funded partly by student technology fees, the OSSD provides a number of services — including advocacy, counseling and study aids as well as assistive technology — to students with physical, learning, hearing and vision disabilities. Ronald Bissessar, manager of assistive technology, tests and provides instruction on all the various assistive technologies at Baruch College.

"My responsibilities, in a nutshell, is to provide students with assistive technology accommodations whether its here in the lab, the library, the classroom or pretty much throughout the whole campus," said Bissessar.

In conjunction with the Baruch College Technology Center, the OSSD lends assistive technology such as voice recorders, speech recognition systems and Braille-printers to students.

The OSSD has even embraced and modified technology available to all students. One student attends class by being linked in via Skype, the popular video chatting and VOIP (Voice-Over-Internet Protocol) provider. Not only can the student listen to the lecture, they can even interact with fellow students and the teacher.

The OSSD also collaborates with specialists outside the school. Using a system called Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), hearing-impaired students get access to real-time transcriptions of lectures.

A microphone-connected laptop picks up a professor's dictations and sends it instantly to a specialist online who transcribes it for the student on the screen. One student's specialist is actually in Nova Scotia.

Outside the classroom, the OSSD provides disabled students with extra services including a lab and an examination center located in the VC at 2-271. Louis Tropp, the assistant director of the OSSD, said, "The office helps more around 250 to 300 Baruch students."

The computer lab features a printer that can print in Braille, a desktop CCTV device that can magnify content from books, as well as computers with voice recognition software. Requiring only approximately 30 minutes of training, the voice recognition software, called Dragon NaturallySpeaking, allows physically disabled students to navigate the computer and input writing with solely their voice.

"Some programs are much easier than others like the [computer screen] magnification one but it also depends on the student's computer skills," said Bissesar. "A screen reader, since it's completely keyboard driven, is harder to learn and the basics can take 5-6 weeks to learn."

Currently, the OSSD website lists nine types of assistive technology that is available to students. Bissesar both trains students to use these and evaluates the new technology.

Using a Nokia N82 loaded with OCR (optical character recognition) software, visually-impaired students can photograph their textbooks and have the cell phone read back the content. In a quick demonstration, the software was far from perfect, but conveyed enough of the information on the page. While the OSSD already has computer-based OCR software, Bissessar stressed that the cell phone's appeal was its portability.

Another gadget under evaluation is the Pulse Smartpen. In conjunction with a special notebook, students can refer back to an audio recording of the class lecture by simply "tapping" the pen on their written notes. The pen will then play back only the part of the recording that is relevant.

"The best part of it, because of the services [the students] get and the technology that is provided, is that the our students go on to graduate," according to Tropp.