The personal computer, when modified with special hardware and software, has opened up exciting and empowering new worlds of education and employment for persons with varying disabilities. Speech synthesis provides spoken output for users who are blind. Screen-enlarging software enables persons with limited vision to read a computer monitor. People with varying motor disabilities can use alternate input systems to enable their using computers. Single switch devices in conjunction with appropriate software permit someone to operate a computer with the use of only one muscle.
Voice recognition lets others control a computer by speech.
Some of these systems also enhance the computer use for persons with cognitive and learning disabilities. I am a blind history professor, and while I functioned professionally for years without a computer, the use of an adapted computer has dramatically increased my independence and my professional output. Students submit their work to me in e-mail, which my computer and synthesizer read to me, freeing me from dependence on a human reader. Simultaneously, it positioned me to be in the forefront of educators integrating computing and information technology into the teaching process. This new technology also provides me access to an encyclopedia, a dictionary, newspapers, magazines, and scholarly monographs.