ICT and people with ‘Special Needs’.
What are special needs?
People with special needs can be defined in many different ways. Normally ‘special need’ people are disabled people with disabilities. These disabilities can be tiny problems that can’t be seen by others but are there, and other problems that people are more aware of and are obviously there and you can see them from just looking.
After some developments in ICT, certain hardware and software has been invented to help people with special needs get on with normal life. In the past people that have had special needs or disabilities haven’t had the amazing equipment that is available now to help them with their day to day lives but luckily now they can be thankful for such inventions.
Sensory Needs
The most common and noticeable special needs are sensory impairments, for example blind or partially sighted people. These are people who can’t, or find it hard to see, but there are things that can be given to them to make their life easier, like a talking computer. So when text is written on the screen, it can be read back to the user. Furthermore, for people who are only partially sighted, the computer screen can be made bigger and font and icons can be made clearer to view. There are such things as “brail keyboards”. This is a normal computer keyboard but with brail writing (writing that blind people use to read, they use it by feeling their hands over the bumps to figure out what the letters are) is used instead of the letters so that the user can type by running their fingers over the keys and finding the letters they need. Sometimes large coloured keys can be made on keyboards so they are easier to see, they can be made up to the size of about 2.5cm. There are also brail printers that use little pins to engrave the brail letters on to the paper.
