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(More customer reviews)Nearly everyone will find themselves disabled, at least to some extent, at some point in their lives. For example, I've been on crutches after an injury, and I've see advancing age limit people's activities in different ways. Technology can do a lot to widen the range of choices despite disabilities, or even to restore those abilities. Using myself as an example again, I would be legally blind in one eye, if not for the technology that made lens implants possible.
Robitaille, herself a beneficiary of a cochlear implant, uses this book to describe many of the products and services available to the disabled. A complete listing would be impossible, or at least obsolete by the time it was finished. Instead, Robitaille draws samples from a wide range, describing their applicability, drawbacks, and cost.
The first chapter addresses aids for visual impairments. These come in many forms, a startling number of which rely on computer technology. The next chapter covers aids for hearing impairments, like Robitaille's own caused by a childhood illness. Although Robitaille mentions a number of ways to help the hearing impaired in a sound-filled society, she also touches on the sensitive subject of deaf culture. Physical and cognitive disabilities have their own chapters, as well. We have more disabled veterans than ever returning to civilian life, ironically because personal armor and battlefield medicine now save so many who would otherwise have died. Wartime injuries, including traumatic brain injuries, represent only a few of the many kind of physical and mental challenges that people face, however, and each challenge needs a solution of its own. Communication disabilities get a chapter of their own, as well.
Robitaille's final chapters cover legislative, legal, and even financial support for assistive technologies. (Early on, she notes that "[Disability] has an impact on ... financial health and well-being." Assistive technologies are often expensive.)
This whirlwind tour of assistive technologies and services does little more than mention the ones that Robitaille has chosen as examples. Still, it's an eye-opening collection, and one likely to help educators, human resources managers, parents and families of the disabled, and anyone to whom "can do, done differently" becomes an important issue.
-- wiredweird
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