Bridging the Digital Divide: Using Free Open-Source Tools to Expand Access to Shared-Use Computers in Schools and Libraries

The use of computers in everyday life has moved from hobby and technical professional use to being essential to almost all activities in people’s lives. However, not everyone has a computer themselves or access to the internet at home. To address this, society provides computers that people can use at school, in libraries, at job centers, in community centers, and at government service centers. However, these are not accessible to those who need assistive technologies (AT), and they are not allowed to install the AT they need to use the computers. This puts people who need to use AT at a severe disadvantage to their peers at best and, at worst, prevents them from participating at all where computer use is required. This is a problem when a person is required to use a particular computer instead of their own and is a total barrier to computer use for those who do not own their own computer. Proposed is the installation of a free utility on all public or shared use computers that both a) exposes the built-in accessibility features in computers to make them easier to discover and use, and b) allows AT users to have any AT the need automatically installed on any computer they encounter, and then set up just for them. When they are done, the AT disappears.

This work represented here is the result of work funded by grants from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research at the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (grant # H133E080022 and 90REGE0008), the Rehabilitation Services Administration, U.S. Dept. of Education (grant H421A150005); the European 7th Framework grants (grant #289016 and 610510), and by the Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. The opinions herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the funding agencies.

Disclosure of Interests.

 Both authors are affiliated with both the University of Maryland and the non-profit Raising the Floor. Both the University of Maryland and the non-profit Raising the Floor were integral to the development of the technologies reported, and Raising the Floor is now distributing Morphic and AT-on-Demand as free, open-source software.

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

   Gregg Vanderheiden & JBern Jordan

2. Raising the Floor, Washington, DC, 20002, USA

   Crystal Marte

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gregg Vanderheiden .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

   Margherita Antona

2. Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

   Constantine Stephanidis

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