Many strides have been made in the last 5 years pertaining to the education of students with disabilities and e-learning content accessibility. For students who need assistance with reading, writing and those with cognitive impairment issues, e learning has been an invaluable aid in and outside the classroom for children with learning challenges.

Even with the much advancement, many of these solutions have been developed for a student who is able to communicate verbally on some level. What about the student who does not communicate through vocalization?

Is there anyway to measure what is gained and whether or not learning comprehension is really taking place? This has been a perplexing issue that has spurned many an educator to write a white paper about.

Strides With Technology And The Non-Verbal Student

Few are the issues in the classroom more demanding than helping the non-verbal child to be able to participate in the learning process and to be able to ensure that learning transfer is taking place. Oftentimes, non-verbal children come with emotional responses to stress, coupled with an inability to verbalize what the stress are.

Students who are unable to articulate verbally are now able to use certain technology tools to help them communicate and be able to interact in the learning environment. These fascinating developments are a great relief to their educators and are excellent confidence builders for the student.

For these students, the education space needs a redefining of the term, “literacy.” What was the norm before has to change to fit within the framework of the non-verbal. With the onset of technology into the learning experience in these cases, interaction with applications and responses to videos and gaming software are being used to gauge learning transfer and retention.

Non-verbal autistic children are now therapeutically being introduced to typing applications so that in some cases, they are able to convey thoughts and ideas for the first time ever, to the immeasurable delight of their education teams and parents.

More Work To Be Done

While new implementations for education are being introduced for non-verbal students through e-learning content accessibility for them to have a greater chance to learn and thrive in their educational environments, there is still more development to be done.

One of the main things plaguing this demographic and the development of new technology tools is the public education space as a whole struggling with the definition of learning retention in students who do not communicate verbally and what it means to offer a blended learning solution for them.

The idea of blended learning has certainly taken hold for almost two decades in the professional development and secondary education space but still lags behind with public education for students in grades K-12. Lack of funding hinders school systems from being able to purchase and implement these new tools and techniques efficiently.

We have come so far and yet we still have a ways to go in educating those who can implement resources for e-learning content accessibility to educate students with disabilities. We need to celebrate the small wins for today and press on for a better future for them tomorrow.