Research Staff in Learning Societies Lab
E.A. Draffan considers herself to be an extremely lucky woman with a job and a family that she loves.
Her passion for tapping into the skills of people with disabilities led to her becoming one of a small band of Speech and Language Therapists specialising in Assistive Technologies, which are aimed at reducing the barriers people encounter when working with computers. She is probably almost as proud of this achievement as she is of having her two kids.
'I'm very much against labelling people and stereotyping,' she said. 'I rarely use the word "disability"; I prefer to look for "skills and abilities". We need to share strategies that will help overcome barriers rather than always dwell on difficulties,' she said.
Not many people know E.A Draffan's real name as throughout her life she has always been known as E.A. Apparently, this was because her father was in the Navy when she came into the world and a telegraph went out saying "Welcome E.A."
She decided to train as a Speech Therapist at Kingdom-Ward School of Speech Therapy (now part of the City University, London). 'If the truth be known, I always talked too much and one of my teachers told me to put this to good use,' she said. She went on to practicse at Queen Mary's Hospital, Carshalton, Surrey in 1972 where she specialised in speech and language therapy for children with learning and mobility disabilities as well as adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome and Autism.
Over the next 20 years, E.A. worked with children who had communication and mobility difficulties due to the thalidomide drug and those with ear, nose and throat issues and also branched into the field of developmental and acquired neurological conditions.
From 1985 to 1994, she was a Speech and Language Therapist and Specialist Teacher at St Michael's School, Petworth, West Sussex where she worked with children and older students with specific learning difficulties and it was here that she became particularly interested in Assistive Technologies (AT).
In general, "assistive technology" is any technology that makes it possible for a person to do something they could not do without that technology. This could mean that a walking stick is an assistive technology and a pair of spectacles or a volume button on a stereo system. In the area of electronic and information communication technology (ICT), an assistive technology is a hardware or software solution that enables someone with a disability to access another piece of hardware or software that they could otherwise not access.
'I didn't stop being a Speech Therapist and move into AT,' she said. 'It was seamless and happened during my time at St Michael's when difficulties arose in finding appropriate computer based material for older students and it was also difficult to achieve accurate assessment criteria for the use of AT.' This scenario led E.A. to get involved in developing AT, a move that was enhanced greatly by her being awarded the Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship.
The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust offers Fellowships to British citizens from all backgrounds, to gain knowledge and experience in other parts of the world. People choose different subjects and fields for their travels. The aims of the fellowship include sharing what is learned, both abroad and in the UK. The Fellowship is described as 'the chance of a lifetime' and this was certainly E.A.'s experience of it. She did a two-month tour of the United States during which she visited over 75 sites which were involved in the support of those with disabilities interested in the use of technology and the Internet.
Her experience on this Fellowship enabled E.A. to return to the UK to look at opportunities to set up similar centres and resulted in her establishing a centre in 1996 at the University of Sussex. 'What was good about this was it allowed us to support students and do research,' said E.A. 'This meant that we could keep offering students the latest technologies.' For the next five years, E.A. worked with students and staff at the University of Sussex, assessing their needs to decide which technologies would suit them best.
'It continues to be the case that technology moves very fast and we struggle to keep up,' she said. Sadly there is always a lag in enabling accessibility to the latest applications, web sites or interactive learning materials.'
In 2001, E.A moved to become a Senior Advisor at TechDis, a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded service supporting the further and higher education community in all aspects of technology and disabilities and/or learning difficulties. She left TechDis in 2004 and now works with Dr Mike Wald who leads research into accessible technologies at University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science and established the University's Centre for Enabling and Learning Technologies (CELT) in 1994.
'I had heard about the work being carried out at ECS in the field of e-learning and accessibility and hoped that by coming here, I could work with the latest technologies and perhaps influence the development of some of it, in terms of usability and accessibility at the outset rather than depend on retrofitting or workarounds!'
E.A.'s hunch was correct and she has worked at ECS since then and is very inspired by her work on the JISC-funded LExDIS project, which develops strategies to enable students with disabilities to participate in e-learning. She is particularly keen to improve speech recognition tools and the access screen-reader users have to on-line learning materials especially those becoming available in the collaborative world of Web 2.0 or 3.0.
She is also very aware of the gap between being able to record lectures and have them automatically transcribed into text via speech recognition software, just as it is not always possible for students working on-line to access social networks using screen readers or text to speech software. She is also keen to encourage young Assistive Technologists into the profession and to work on the development of an MSc programme in this field.
E.A. is incredibly grateful for the life that she has been given, for the love of her family and having been lucky enough to achieve many different milestones in her career that she hopes have impacted on the world of assistive technology within the field of education.
