To serve adults with disabilities without a high school diploma, the federal government and states have funded adult education and literacy programs that provide services to accommodate the needs of those adults. In addition, the Tests of General Educational Development (GED Tests) provide adults with disabilities with testing accommodations to…

More recent motivational research focuses on the identification of effective techniques for enhancing instructional design and meeting the needs of diverse student populations (Wlodkowski R. J., 1981). Learning-motivation researchers are applying some of the same theories and concepts found to be effective in industry to the development of…

This study explored if and how vision rehabilitation services address important life goals of young and middle-aged adults who are visually impaired. It found that services that teach functional skills and offer psychosocial therapeutic-type services were instrumental in addressing life goals and that independence-related goals were most often…

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system (CNS) that is increasingly recognized as a disease that affects children. Similar to adult-onset MS, children present with visual and sensory complaints, as well as weakness, spasticity, and ataxia. A lumbar puncture can be helpful in diagnosing MS when…

Early detection of significant vision problems in children is a high priority for pediatricians and school nurses. Routine vision screening is a necessary part of that detection and has traditionally involved acuity charts. However, photoscreening in which "red eye" is elicited to show whether each eye is focusing may outperform routine acuity…

Many questionnaires attempt to assess the quality of life of individuals who are visually impaired (that is, those who are blind or have low vision), but few apply to those who are undergoing visual rehabilitation and hence are difficult to adapt as an outcome measure Massof & Rubin, 2001). The Reading Behavior Inventory (RBI) was developed as…

One major objective of programs for persons with severe or profound intellectual and multiple disabilities is to teach these persons occupational and vocational tasks and to enable them to carry out these tasks independently (Davis, Brady, Williams, & Burta, 1992; Lancioni et al., 1991; Steed & Lutzker, 1997). The performance of such tasks has…

The standard display of web pages is inadequate for users who are visually impaired. Most visually impaired people obtain information from a web page in a linear fashion via a screen reader, whereas sighted users can immediately obtain a bird's-eye view of a web page's organization and content by quickly scanning the page. AcceSS (which stands for…

Over the past decade, testing has become an important component of education reform efforts. Currently, 49 states have formal programs that annually test students in all public schools. Although the subject areas and grade levels tested vary widely across states, the most recent federal education legislation requires all states to administer…

This article describes the Early Braille Readers Project, which provided a Mountbatten Pro Brailler and peripheral equipment to 20 kindergarteners, first-, and second graders in Texas. The project included training and support in the form of site visits and teacher training for both teachers of students with visual impairments and classroom…

Based on a study by Cox (2004), this article deals with the needs of students with visual, hearing, and orthopedic impairments in terms of full access to school library media centers. Fictitious vignettes of student concerns as well as possible answers and thought-provoking questions expand Cox's rural Missouri-based study to a much wider audience…

Walter Cronkite High School is a comprehensive high school of nearly 4,000 students, located in New York City. The population of students with disabilities includes many students with severe and low-incidence disabilities, including 70 students with visual or hearing impairments and 20 students with orthopedic impairments. Cronkite High School's…

This study of a national sample of elders served by the Independent Living Program for Older Individuals Who Are Blind found that, overall, they were highly satisfied with the quality and timeliness of services and help in achieving independent living goals. A slight improvement was found in their perceptions of functional outcomes from 1999 to…

There are occasions at a busy reference desk when contact time with patrons is limited. A solution to this is to create a mediated reference search service where librarians can have the luxury of conducting extended reference interviews. One-on-one searching services can be very beneficial for library patrons, including students, staff,…

This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic…