While colleges across the nation adapt to online learning, Gallaudet and Apple are collaborating to support deaf students. In an unprecedented partnership, Apple will provide each of Gallaudet’s students and faculty members with an iPad Pro, professional development opportunities, and other educational tools.
Gallaudet is a prestigious university for deaf and hard of hearing students. This partnership with Apple invites faculty and students to work alongside tech professionals to imagine bilingual, user-friendly technologies that will benefit students of all abilities.
Sarah Herrlinger, who leads Apple’s accessibility programs, describes how this collaboration began. Herrlinger states, “We have a deep respect for Gallaudet’s legacy and its important role in advancing deaf culture and education. This most recent program began shortly after last May’s opening of Apple Carnegie Library in DC, which is close to Gallaudet. Our team there includes more than 30 team members from this community and who’re proficient in ASL.”
In the year since the Apple Carnegie Library opened, the company’s relationship with Gallaudet has grown. This semester, Apple will deliver an iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Smart Keyboard Folio to every Gallaudet student. Herrlinger explains how these technologies are designed with accessibility in mind: “We’re incredibly proud of how iPad has made education more inclusive for differently-abled students” with the suite of accessible apps in the Apple store. These accessibility features include sound recognition software and a recent Face Time update that automatically recognizes when a participant is using sign language in a video call.
Students are already reporting positive learning outcomes after participating in the Apple-Gallaudet partnership. SaraBeth Sullivan is a Ph.D. student in the Educational Neuroscience program. She explains that the new technology “has been an immense improvement to my work because I am able to use the iPad Pro as a ‘sidecar’ with my laptop, supporting Zoom classes and allowing me to work more efficiently. It has also given me access to Adobe Creative Suite at home, which has been very helpful for my research project.”
And for Sullivan, who is learning during COVID-19, this collaboration couldn’t have come at a better time. She states, “I definitely feel like students like me benefit from this partnership because we are typically used to having this technology at our disposal on Gallaudet's campus, and now I have these resources at my fingertips from my home.”
Elizabeth Martinez, an English major, initially was hesitant about how Gallaudet would partner with Apple during this period of online learning. She writes, “Honestly, at first I was unsure how this would work. When I received the iPad, I realized that it helped me a lot.” After receiving her iPad, Martinez has enjoyed exploring Apple’s various apps. Martinez uses Zoom, Gmail, and digital notetaking tools to organize her online learning. She thinks that her new “iPad helps with that a lot. I even use Blackboard to access my classes. The best one of all that I rely on so much is my Google Calendar. It gives me my schedule for Zoom classes and meetings.”
Professors at Gallaudet hope that this partnership will encourage other tech companies to design more accessible programs for people of all abilities. Dr. Julie A. Hochgesang, an Associate Professor in Linguistics, has long used Apple products. Hochgesang identifies as deaf. Because she uses American Sign Language, Hochgesang remarks that “the visual experience is important to me in making the auditory world accessible.”
Fortunately for Hochgesang and her students, Apple products integrate visual tools like captions, graphics, and transcriptions. Hochgesang explains, “All humans are multimodal; they make good use of the different modes and resources available to them for communication. Apple products, overall the most accessible tech I have experienced, have enabled such multimodality.”
For the Gallaudet community and the Apple techmakers, this rollout is an important step in designing a more accessible future. Hochgesang believes that these types of partnerships can encourage tech companies to consult people with disabilities to make better products: “As noted by many disability advocates like Liz Jackson and Haben Girma, most technology is initially developed based on the lived experiences of educated, middle-class, white, able-bodied, right-handed men. That experience does not represent the majority of human experience. Technology should be based on those different lived experiences from the start.”
Herrlinger agrees. When asked about the future of Apple’s relationship with Gallaudet, Herrlinger says, “Many of the amazing accessible technologies from Apple exist because people with disabilities within Apple helped bring them to life and are the same devices and features they themselves rely on every day.” Herrlinger is excited to ask students and faculty about their experiences using their new iPads so she can work with the Apple team to make even more effective products. She says, “When you design for accessibility it leads to a better product for everyone. It’s in this same spirit that we’re working with Gallaudet — because we know we all win when we level the playing field.”
People with disabilities have long been forced to cope with insufficient technologies and innovate their own solutions. The students and faculty at Gallaudet are addressing these inadequacies, including the intersections of disability and race through their new scholarship program for students of color studying STEM or IT. This partnership between the world’s leading deaf university and the world’s biggest tech company demonstrates that a more accessible future is possible, one line of code and one app at a time.
Find out more about Gallaudet University’s history and programs by clicking here, and learn more about Apple’s accessibility efforts by visiting their website here.
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