AT in the Daily Lives of YO! Volunteers

by Kirk Aranda, Youth Advocate

In honor of National Volunteer Week which took place last week (April 21-27) across the country, we wanted to highlight some of our Youth Organizing! (YO!) Volunteers and the different assistive technology devices that they use.  The AT that is used varies greatly which just goes to show that Many devices we use every day can be considered AT and that you may even be using AT right now and not even know it. We hope you enjoy getting to learn a little bit more about our YO! Volunteers.  

http://www.gokeytech.com/compact_keyboard_w__keyguard.htm

Alexa, the YO! Volunteer in Sacramento and Northern Regional Leader for the Disability History Week Campaign,   is a student at Sacramento State and uses a keyguard on her computer. A keyguard is a device that fits over the computer keyboard and separates the keys from one another. This makes it easier for Alexa to type and has helped her type up documents and create power-point presentations.  She also uses a keyguard when using her computer to complete her Sac State homework.

http://sites.fcps.org/trt/livescribe-pen-demo

We are also lucky to have YO! Volunteer, Darion, from Fresno. Darion attends Willows College and is very big into assistive technology, so naturally he’s interested in all the different gadgets that are out there. There are a couple of different AT devices he uses regularly too, though. One of those is Dragon Dictation, which is a voice recognition application that turns speech into text. This makes work a lot easier for Darion and countless others. He also uses a Live Scribepen. Live Scribe can record what is being said in a room so that you can go back and listen to a lesson verbatim and get down every detail that was discussed, as well as play back any information that you may have originally missed.  Both of these devices help Darion succeed in school on a daily basis.

http://www.auto-handcontrols.com/handicaps_inc_controls.htm

Jenaro is another YO! Volunteer from Garden Grove down in Southern California who attends Cerritos College and is the Chair for the Disability History Week Campaign.  The AT that Jenaro uses is that he has had his car equipped with hand controls so that he can drive to school, to the Dayle McIntosh Center where he works, to outreach presentations on Disability History at schools  as well as anywhere else he needs to go.

http://verballyapp.com/

The last YO! Volunteer, Damary, comes from Hayward in the Bay Area. Damary uses the iPhone and iPad application “Verbally” which helps allow Damary to communicate. Damary simply types into her device what she would like to say and it repeats it back outloud. It has helped her with her college classes as well as helping her run Disability Action Network for Youth (DANY) meetings in Hayward. She has even demonstrated the Verbally app  in a AT Network video contest to show how it works and won third place! 

We are so grateful to all of our YO! volunteers and we are grateful for AT devices - we couldn't do our important work without volunteers or AT.  Three cheers for YO! VOluntteers and three cheers for the AT devices they use to accomplish their important tasks and to be independent.