Is the shortcut the quickest way to go?

Abstract

The author works in Coventry University and has been engaged in tutoring a student with disabilities who had enrolled for a degree in Business and IT at Coventry University. To do this, the author drew upon previous experiences in the Further Education (FE) sector at a College in the Midlands, where she taught Information Technology (IT) to diverse groups of students who had varied abilities. The ages of the FE students ranged from pre-16, visiting the College from a local special school to attend "taster" sessions, to adults, some of whom were seniors, attending a day centre for disabled adults that had a special arrangement for College tutors to give classes. The degree student was a white cane user, read Braille and navigated the computer with screen reader software. During her time at University, she took on an ambassadorial role: she gave guided tours to prospective students around the University campus during open days! From time to time she would recount stories that she described as amusing but which clearly showed ignorance on the part of her tutors. The Degree course in Business and IT had several workshops in Computing including statistics where spreadsheets and specialist software were used. The author was asked to tutor the student for the IT workshops of a year-long module. This included translating the instructional handouts from mouse-based to keyboard-based, being aware of potential problems with specialist software and the quirks of the online learning system (WebCT) [1] and finding ways of working around them all. This "tips and techniques" session gives an account of some of these issues around the student's stories, creating and translating instructions for keyboard use navigating the keyboard using JAWS, and includes proposed solutions.