Adventures in Adaptive Technology

For the past week or so I've been mulling over my reference encounters, unsuccessfully trying to find a topic to write about. However, after the reference question I just finished, I've stumbled upon a topic. Eureka!

Here's something I don't remember learning much about in library school: adaptive technologies for the hearing and visually impaired, which we may happen across from time to time as librarians.

Like today, for instance. When the phone rang, I fully expected that I would be asked to repeat my standard Saturday evening reference mantra: "We close at 9 p.m. tonight." Instead, I was introduced to the new and fascinating world of voice carryover calls at the Michigan Relay Center. The operator explained that the person calling was deaf -- he would talk to me directly, and the operator would type my response and send it to his TTY phone. While I had heard about this service before, I had not actually experienced it. It took me a while to get the hang of what was going on. I frequently forgot to say "go ahead" at the end of my response, signaling the operator to send the message. It also took me a while to figure out that when the patron said "GA," he meant "go ahead".

This made for a long reference question, made even longer by the content of the question. The patron was, I believe translating a passage in the bible either into or out of Greek. He was looking for the nuances in meaning of a few Greek words. Collection development side note: perhaps UGL should invest in a Greek dictionary that has the Greek words in both Cyrillic and Latin (English) letters. But most of the Greek/English dictionary Web sites I found didn't include both sets of letters either.

But I digress.

Today's situation reminded me of a patron I helped a few weeks ago: a legally blind student who had to write an art appreciation paper about two paintings. I had assumed that books would be completely off limits, and everything we found would need to be online so she could use her screen reader. However, I learned that she could checkout or make photocopies of books, scan them using OCR technology, and then open them on her computer so that her screen reader could read them. Looking back, this doesn't seem like such a groundbreaking technique, but I had never thought of doing so until then. Our time together was very collaborative: I told her what I was searching for on the book catalog, we talked through the search results, I retrieved the books for her and then bookmarked the relevant pages. Using the databases, I was able to e-mail the articles to her directly.

While we were working, a patron standing nearby was watching and listening to the process intently. She had a nephew who was blind, and she had no idea that so many resources were available to him. Patron #1 then explained about the Educational Accessiblity Services (in Suite 1600), and the resources available at the Detroit Public Library. More information is available at the library's page on adaptive technologies.

Have any of your classes discussed adaptive technologies in the library? Because mine really haven't, and it would seem like an important topic to cover.