AMANDA HYNAN FINAL THESIS PDF

A clear picture emerged within this research that literacy skills were an important
strategy for independent use of the internet and online social media as many physical
limitations could be overcome with appropriate access technology. Although the
development of the software programme described earlier is having an enormous
impact and allowing participants without literacy to use online social media for the
first time, it is still clear that a lack of literacy skills had the biggest impact for
preventing sophisticated and broad internet and online social media engagement. This
supports the research of Raghavendra et al. (2013) who found for some participants
“literacy skills were a bigger barrier than their primary disability or technical issues”
(p. 558).
By building on the motivation to use social networking and scaffolding reading and
writing with screen reader and word prediction software, Raghavendra et al. (2013)
enabled successful social media engagement. They showed by case study data that
one young man who had been working collaboratively was delighted after 11 months
of intervention when he could independently post and share information on Facebook
due to the technical support he had received to overcome his literacy restrictions.
Research with a different population of people who have literacy challenges due to
dyslexia also reported challenges for making sense of web content as web pages
sometimes contained too much information and links and destinations were not
always consistently labelled or clear (Freire, 2012). Gillette (2006) showed how the
use of hardware and software technology (such as text to speech) helped a young man
with learning difficulties/disabilities to improve his literacy skills.
Being able to use symbolised vocabulary on integrated VOCAs was a major strategy
for enabling young people with low or non-existent literacy skills to use texting for
the first time. Participants were clearly encouraged by this and enjoyed the increased
privacy and contact this provided with family and friends. This specific area is being
explored extensively by traditional AAC manufacturers who are producing a host of
social media tools at software and hardware level. I was supplied with documentation
outlining a project (initiated by the requests of students) within one of the educational
settings to use a specific AAC software programme to build accessible access to
Twitter, Facebook and Skype. This reaction from the manufacturers and colleges in
relation to the desires of young people to use the internet and online social media
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