Bridging the concepts of Educational Software and Assistive Technology

The paper looks at the educational resources available for students with disabilities. It aims at defining the boundaries and interconnections between the concepts of assistive technologies and educational software, starting from the consideration that students with disabilities could highly benefit from the adoption of both these categories of tools. Here the question arises of whether educational software products can be considered per se as assistive devices or, if not, under which conditions. The paper explores the matter, with the specific objective of providing teachers and educators with a conceptual key to properly explore the specific databases containing information on the educational available tools and, finally, to find the needed, suitable material for students with disabilities. The creation of the European ETNA portal for assistive technologies represented the occasion for starting the reflections reported in this paper and for defining a specific methodology for the introduction of educational software in disability-related databases. The ETNA portal itself, whose aims and foundations are also briefly described, coherently instantiates the adopted methodology by referring to the emerging concept that educational software can be considered and adopted as an assistive device for learning, provided that it meets key accessibility requirements and/or that specific practices with disabled students are fully documented and reported.