Supporting students with disabilities

What a teacher without a specialist can now do

In much of the world a class contains students with disabilities and no specialist within reach. The teacher does what she can. Some of what she can do has changed.

Here is a practical list, disability by disability, of what is free and works, with the honest limit of each.

Visual impairment. The model describes images: photograph a diagram, a page, a worksheet, and ask for a description a blind student could use. It does this well for simple material and unevenly for complex diagrams. Be My Eyes, a free app, connects a blind user to an AI describer and to volunteer humans. Screen readers are built into every phone and laptop (TalkBack on Android, VoiceOver on iPhone, Narrator on Windows, NVDA free on Windows) and generated material in plain text works with all of them, where a scanned worksheet does not. The limit: descriptions of a graph or a map from the model can be wrong in the detail that matters, and for anything assessed, a person checks.

Hearing impairment. Live captions: Google’s Live Transcribe on Android is free and captions speech in real time in many languages; Windows and iPhone have built-in live captions; Google Meet and Teams caption calls. A phone on the desk running Live Transcribe gives a deaf student the lesson as text. The limit: the accent and language gradient from the previous lesson, and classroom noise; and captions are not sign language, which a student may need and which no free tool provides well yet.

Dyslexia and reading difficulties. The previous two lessons: chunked and spaced formats, glossaries, read-aloud. These are the best-evidenced supports and they cost nothing.

Autism. Predictability and structure. The model can produce a visual timetable for the day, a social story for an upcoming change (a trip, a new teacher, a fire drill) written the way social stories are written, a step-by-step task sheet with no ambiguity, and a set of the exact words a task requires. It is good at this because the formats are well documented. The limit: every autistic student is different, and a social story that fits one is wrong for another; the teacher who knows the student edits the draft.

ADHD. Chunked tasks with a checkbox per step, a timer, one instruction at a time, an explicit “you are finished when” line. The model produces the chunking in seconds. The limit: the chunking is the easy part; the routine that makes a student use it is the teacher’s work.

Physical and motor difficulties. Dictation, from the previous lesson, and a document rather than a worksheet, so the student types or dictates where others write.

Speech and language difficulties. The model can generate practice material at a controlled level, picture-word cards, sentence frames. The limit: speech therapy is a clinical practice and the material supports it; it does not deliver it.

The line

The check question is about the line, and it is this: a support plan for a specific child is written by someone who has assessed that child. The model has not. It can produce a document that looks like a plan (strategies, targets, review dates) and the document will be generic, because it was generated from the general literature, not from the student. Filed as the student’s plan, it does two harms: it stands where an assessment should be, and it can satisfy a system that then never refers the student to the specialist they need.

Use the model for what is under that line. Draft the social story. Make the chunked task sheet. Generate the picture cards. Describe the diagram. Write the letter to the district asking for an assessment, and make it a good one. All of that helps the student today. Writing the plan does not.

Where there is no specialist

Many teachers reading this have no route to an assessment at all. The honest advice is: use everything under the line, keep a record of what you tried and what happened, and keep asking. The record is the thing that eventually gets a student assessed, and the model can help you keep it: a dated log, a summary of a term’s observations for a referral letter. What it cannot do is be the assessment, and a teacher should not let it pretend to be.

Involving the student and the family

A student with a disability usually knows what helps. Ask. A parent has usually tried things. Ask. The model’s drafts go to them as drafts (“here is a timetable format, does this look like something that would work”) and the version that survives is the one they shaped. This is not politeness. It is how the generic becomes specific, and the generic is all the model has.

The honest limit

The tools in this lesson are for access, and access to a lesson is not the same as the specialist teaching that a disability may require. A blind student with a good screen reader and well-formatted material can follow the lesson; she still needs braille, or orientation and mobility, or whatever her plan says, from people trained to provide it. The model widens what a non-specialist teacher can do, and a teacher should be clear-eyed that widening is what it is.