"For most of us, technology makes things easier. For a person with a disability, it makes things possible."
With this quotation attributed to Judy Heumann, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, two College of Education faculty members and a colleague from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, launched a massive collection of articles about the use of assistive technology for people with disabilities.
Kyle Higgins and Randall Boone from UNLV and Dave L. Edyburn from Wisconsin recently published the 873-page Handbook. The volume contains 41 articles by more than 90 authors on topics ranging from the history of technology use to current trends and issues.
Higgins and Boone both came to UNLV 15 years ago and have collaborated on a number of works. They met their coauthor, Edyburn, in the 1980s, and Higgins says the three-way effort to put together the Handbook "was a joy and a labor of love."
The authors write that public policymakers began showing serious interest in the potential of technology in the early 1980s, when a number of individuals reported the positive benefits of technology in their lives. The examples were so persuasive that the federal government enacted laws to "provide mechanisms for capturing the potential of technology on an everincreasing scale."
They also confess that as editors "we perceived the need for an authoritative work compiling the knowledge base of the discipline of special education technology. Lest anyone question our motivation, let us be perfectly clear: Selfishly, we wanted this book on our desktop."
