[Athen] Advice for colleague in Ireland

[Berkowitz, Daniel J]

Good Morning Enda,

 

One of your best resources in the UK is fellow ATHEN member E.A Draffan
(who will also be the keynote speaker at AHG this year). 

 

In Ireland proper I recommend contact Ted Harvey at UC-Dublin:
http://www.ucd.ie/disability/services_atc.html

Ted is well versed in many areas of AT and runs a proper lab that may
fulfill your demonstration needs. 

 

Cheers --- Dann  
========================= 
Daniel Berkowitz - Assistant Director 
Boston University Office of Disability Services 
19 Deerfield Street, 2nd floor 
Boston, MA 02215 
  
(617) 353-3658 (office) 
(617) 353-9646 (fax) 
djbrky at bu.edu <mailto:djbrky at bu.edu>  (eMail) 
www.bu.edu/disability <http://www.bu.edu/disability>  
  

________________________________

From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On
Behalf Of Enda P Guinan
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 6:08 AM
To: Access Technologists in Higher Education Network
Subject: [Athen] Advice for colleague in Ireland

 

Hello ATHENians,

Some of you may be in a position to help me with some hard evidence!

I'm the Assistive Technology Advisor in National University of Ireland,
Maynooth (I met some of you at the conference in Boulder, CO last year).
I and my colleagues in the Disability Office have been invited to meet
our college president and computer services to discuss our needs.

Naturally I have a nice long list of things to discuss (better
integration of alt format production with the library, computer services
to accept a greater role in the provision of assistive technology on
campus, documented policy on the college production of digital documents
etc etc).

However, Computer Services have told me that they are happy to listen to
my big dreams, but unless I can demonstrate that other "similar sized
institutions" have these in place, it won't be easy to make these things
realities.

A little about us; NUI Maynooth has 6,000 full time students and maybe
2,000 part time students. It has three faculties: Arts, Social Sciences
and Science and Engineering. We have an Assistive Technology Centre with
15 networked PCs open 9-6 Mon-Fri, fill-time AT advisor (me) and some
part time student trainers. We have two PCs in an Assistive Technology
Room in the library. Supports for students with disabilities comes
largely from funding from the European Union rather than the
university's core budget. All software on campus is installed locally.
There is goodwill towards our work, but anything to do with disability
is (wrongly) seen as solely our responsibility. Our equivalent to 508 is
not yet robust enough to use as leverage. 

So, any similar-sized institutions out there willing to give me advice
on the following?:
1. Are there similar colleges with site licences for Kurzweil,
Inspiration, Dragon etc installed on a central server? 
2. Do Computer services in such colleges take a more active role in the
installation and troubleshooting on such packages?
3. Do such colleges have an alt format production system that is not
solely the responsibility of disability services?


Sorry if this is a tad longwinded, but I hope someone out there can
help!

Thanks in advance,

Enda





Enda P Guinan
Assistive Technology Advisor
Access Office
NUI Maynooth

P: +353 1 708 4654
F: +353 1 708 3838
E: enda.guinan at nuim.ie 
W: http://access.nuim.ie <http://access.nuim.ie/>  

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