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Essential
Number One |
Accept from
the beginning that AT selection is always an experiment. No matter
how organized and exhaustive your process for considering a consumer’s
abilities, functional needs, living context and funding issues,
there will always be an element of doubt in AT choice. You really
won’t know how well a system or device will work until
the consumer tries it. And even then …
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Essential
Number Two |
The process
of AT selection will always involve “tradeoffs”.
This is a vital concept that originates in the world of design
engineering (not surprising since the process of selecting and
integrating AT from what’s offered in the marketplace is
a design process). In a nutshell, it means that you can’t
have everything. The Acme 2000 will offer more features and more
pleasing appearance, but the Zenith 2000 will be easier for the
consumer to learn due to its more lucid and consistent user interface.
This means that in trying to estimate “how well a device
will work” for a consumer, you’ll need to accept
from the start that this means more than one thing and that different
desirables will need to weighed against each other. You will even
need to accept that “Some elements of Assistive Technology
can themselves become barriers to performance.”1
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Essential
Number Three |
A related rule
is that the consumer and you will, most likely, not have the
inclinations or resources to try all, or even many, possibilities.
One reasonably successful choice of AT may be all that the third-party
payment system will allow. The lending library of devices, if
there is one, may only offer a limited set of options to try
out. A user’s reaction to a device after brief use may
or may not be predictive of her/his longer-term experience. And
the consumer’s desire to get on with her/his life instead
of mucking around with additional AT choices to find something
better may lead to selection of a product which is acceptable
but not necessarily “optimal” (which is rarely well-defined,
as noted above in essential 2). However …
Notes
1See
ATAP Guiding Principle 2 via Zabala.
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