Posts by Laura Hall

Modern browsers are gigantic affairs, designed to manage the remarkable variety of content available online, but also designed to do many more things, using a wide diversity of add-ons, scripting systems, plugins, revenue enhancement tools, and so on, ad infinitum. Now that wide bandwidth is more the rule than the exception, this makes some sense.…

Until recently, the general approach to paid leave as an accommodation was to allow or require it unless it reached the ADA threshold of an “undue burden”. For example, Federal ADA guidance suggests the following two-factor approach to this threshold: “Undue burden means significant difficulty or expense. In determining whether an action would result in…

All my life, I have had a fine motor coordination problem with my hands. My cursive writing is illegible. When I was in Catholic elementary school the nuns made me practice my cursive for an hour every day for an entire school year before concluding that I simply couldn’t improve. My printing is only somewhat better,…

There is a universal design approach to handling the barriers of fall and winter, but the reality is that it requires real customization and thought long before the barrier appears. Since it is early fall, I thought I’d summarize the universal design approach before expanding the possibilities with a social support approach I ran across…

Introduction There is a small but growing movement among people with disabilities, engineers, students, families, and others who cherish personal independence and freedom of choice to take access to Assistive Technology (AT) to its next stage. This is an opportunity for all of us to gain control over the tools we need to support ourselves…

Amazon’s second generation Dash Wand is out. What potential does it have to support personal independence for members of our community? The Wand is an example of the use of a technology platform (Amazon’s Echo/Alexa) to reduce the friction in accessing products of all kinds. While the technology is not specifically aimed at people with…

In my last post, I tried to make the case that now is the time to disrupt special education because it has become rigid, compliance-driven, bureaucratic, and politically corrupted. In other words, the mission of special education as it was originally envisioned when it began in the 1970’s has been gradually parasitized by the interests of…

I became directly involved in special education advocacy in 1981 when I went to work for Michigan Protection and Advocacy Service. The national special education requirements (The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975) were still relatively new then. But, over the years, the large-scale vision of educational support customized to each individual student…