New speech systems can recognize and convert spoken words into words on a computer screen. By enabling the disabled to attend regular schools, work at jobs, and participate more fully in society, these systems are both tremendously fulfilling for the people who use them and cost-effective to society as a whole. T hrough recent history there have been two views of technology. The first sees technology as available predominantly to the economically advantaged. The second sees technology as a means of lowering barriers between the financially well off and those less economically fortunate.
History suggests that the latter is most often the relationship of technology and society.
Major technologies deployed today, such as the airplane, saw early acceptance by those with financial resources, but increasingly and especially in recent decades have become much more available, as evidenced by the wide use of air travel. Electronic technologies more than any in the past have spread rapidly at much lower costs. Today games played by children are purchased and played across all socioeconomic groups. Though poor neighborhoods and families face daunting challenges, technology deployed in education can help remove inequities between the schools of the inner city and the suburbs, between cities and rural districts, and inequities faced by people with physical disabilities and by Native Americans. Technology can become the force that equalizes the educational opportunities of all children regardless of location and social and economic circumstance.