Computers can do some wonderful stuff, but not many of them can be a student’s eyes and ears.

Unless the student is enrolled in classes taught in Grossmont’s Assistive Technology Center, otherwise known as the ATC.

In that relationship, it is the computers that can see and hear, and the students who can’t, or those who cannot physically manipulate a standard computer.
It is a relationship at Grossmont that has existed since the early 1980s, with the founding of the ATC as a collaborative partnership between Computer Systems and Information Services, and Disabled Students Programs and Services. ATC’s initial mission was to equip students who were disabled, with fundamental computer skills.

“In recent years, it has become clear that many of the students served in the Assistive Technology Center require the use of alternate media, in addition to receiving computer instruction,” said ATC Lab coordinator Carl Fielden.

“To that end,” he said, “the ATC has been engaged in a seven-year process of purchasing and upgrading a wide variety of assistive technology products to make computers and, as a consequence, instructional programs, accessible to any student with a disability who enters our center.

These products include text-to-speech software that “reads” text that has been typed into the computer. It includes scanning/reading software that reads textbooks aloud to students. There is voice recognition software, that lets students dictate text into a computer using a microphone. There is text magnification hardware and software, Braille and tactile graphics hardware, and alternative keyboards and mouses.

Thus is opened up computer power to students with learning and visual disabilities, brain injury, hearing impairments, speech and language impairments, and mobility limitations.

“We also have the capability to produce textbooks in electronic form so students with disabilities can ‘read’ them auditorily on special digital players,” Fielden said.

Nearly 300 students are served by ATC, said Fielden, who has contributed a chapter on learning disabilities to a new book, Diversity in College Classrooms.

Students are also assisted in the ATC lab by Regina Fernandez, lead lab aid, and Will Pines, alternate media specialist, as well as part-time employees Bill Brown, Brian Hotelling, Cheng-Fei Lai, Pam Camp, Ed Schumacher, Parastou Sadatmousavi, and student lab aide Amy Wilson.