The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has 350 students that identify themselves as students with disabilities.
Sixty-one percent of them are students with learning disabilities, but a significant amount are visually or hearing impaired or have limited mobility.
"I'm sure there are a lot more on campus that haven't been identified," said Veva Cheney, the director of UNL's Services for Students with Disabilities.
Tools designed to help students with disabilities succeed in college are being developed on other campuses, but similar work for disabled students is being done at UNL.
"We've come a long way," Cheney said.
Programs for disabled people can read computer screens and help navigate the Web, Cheney said. There are even programs that can be trained to identify voices.
These programs can help students with a range of disabilities, Cheney said. But most of the software programs are very expensive, occasionally costing more than $30,000.
Most visually-impaired students at UNL use an $80 program called ReadPlease that can read text on a computer screen. But new technology will bring new costs.
"The more advanced it is the more it's going to cost," Cheney said.
Alternatives to the software include having volunteers record passages from students' textbooks. Last fall's program had 105 books taped for the 28 students who used it.
"Some students wouldn't be successful without it," Cheney said.
These programs give disabled students the ability to learn to use important technology, said Lauren Schaefer, a junior speech language pathology and audiology major.
It can be a risk to have students depend on technology so much, Schaefer said.
"Still, it's always interesting to see what they come up with," she said.
mimiabebe@dailynebraskan.com
