Proposal

Technology Fee Proposal for Hardware for the Office for Students with Disabilities

The Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) ensures accessibility to students at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) by providing the use of specialized assistive technology hardware to OSD students on all FAU campuses. This allows students to engage fully in classroom activity and function independently in pursuing their academic goals at FAU. The OSD not only provides the technological means to achieve these goals, but also offers the required training to fully utilize the equipment in an effective and useful manner. The technology hardware requested in this proposal is chosen to fully meet this goal and to uphold the highest access to instructional technology in the most effective and cost efficient manner.

 We are requesting 12 Apple iPads for use by OSD students. 6 of these will be used by students who are deaf to receive real-time transcriptions provided by our C-Print captionists. This will allow these students to have equal access to lectures in the classroom. The remaining 6 requested iPads are needed to fulfill increased demand by our students who use them for accessing assistive technology such as alternative text reading software for print impaired students, screen reading software for visually impaired students, augmentative/alternative communication software for students with communication disorders and other assistive technology applications for OSD students. These iPads are used to train students in the use of assistive technology that will help them with coursework, and then they are able to check out an iPad for a semester to utilize the applications they have learned. We are requesting 2 Plustek Opticbook  B4800 book scanners for our students with print disabilities to be able to scan their bound textbooks in order to produce accessible alternative format text. We are requesting 1 Orion Ti84 Plus Graphing Calculator for our Blind students who are taking mathematics and science courses where audible graph representations are required. We are requesting 5 Sanheiser SC330 microphone headsets for our students with motor and writing difficulties in order for them to input speech for accurate voice recognition using our Dragon Naturally Speaking software. We currently use a server and attached data storage device to provide network management for our assistive technology lab and department. These hardware components are now aging after 5 years of heavy usage and need to be upgraded. We would like to request to replace them with a Dell R520 server and a Dell Direct Attached Storage device. The last item we are requesting is a Panasonic DMC-Ts5 camera to replace our current malfunctioning camera that we use for creating training materials and documenting student events for the OSD brochures and website.

These requested items in this technology proposal will provide increased accessibility to our OSD students with disabilities and ensure the continuation of the highest quality information technology services that foster support, equality and inclusiveness to students at FAU.