Accessible, Assistive Technology: A Chat With Keegan Newberry Asst. Director at DDA

May 29th to June 4th is National Accessibility Week in Canada. We sat down with Keegan Newberry, DDA's Assistant Director of Assistive Technology, to discuss what's happening in the community and business world to help facilitate accessibility for people with developmental disabilities.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Evan Kelly  0:05   So welcome to Developmental Disabilities Association's Encouraging Abilities podcast, of course, we're here to tell stories and chat with members of our neurodiverse community I'm your host, Evan Kelly, the Communications Manager here at DDA. Today we are chatting with our very own Keegan Newberry. She is our Assistant Director of Assistive Technology here at DDA, which means she uses a bunch of different things or applications or adapt devices, adaptive devices, rather, to really help our clients communicate, have fun and learn. And one of the reasons she's here today is because it is national accessibility week in Canada. So we're doing a couple of podcasts just based on that. So right off the top Keegan, maybe you could just tell me a little bit about what you do here at DDA.

Keegan Newberry  0:51   Sure. Thanks for the lovely intro. So what I basically do at DDA is I allow our clients to be as independent as possible. And I do that by looking at what they want in their day to day activities, trying to give them the best sort of lived experience by removing barriers. And that often means introducing different technologies to help overcome barriers that we have for them to access the community or to interact with friends.

Evan Kelly  1:24   So what got you interested in this line of work?

Keegan Newberry  1:27   I came from the high school system of years ago as a high school teacher. And I was working with a primary, primarily ESL demographic group. And while I was teaching a social studies class, and writing my exams, like a high school teacher usually does, I came to the realization that with my exam, am I actually testing for their social studies knowledge? Or am I testing for their ability to read English? And that really kind of made me look at what barriers are present in our everyday lives that we don't even consider. And so after finishing my year at teaching, I decided to go into special education. And so I could help individuals with developmental disabilities to sort of specifically target those barriers that are kind of hidden in a lot of things that we do. 

Evan Kelly  2:23   So did you, in terms of your high school teaching, you then launched yourself into, in within a high school, helping people with neurodiversities maybe or?

Keegan Newberry  2:34   I went actually to the elementary system, specifically, because I wanted to work with individuals who had complex needs, I think a lot of the resources that we have available tend to be for people at either ends of the ability spectrum. So for individuals who have complex needs, such as multiple diagnoses, or developmental disability plus a motor impairment or speech impairment, they're... the tools needed for them to overcome these barriers are much more complex; it involves a lot more creative problem solving to get around it. And that's where I really saw my, what I was doing, having a direct impact on the clients I was supporting, and for me, that was the most rewarding,

Evan Kelly  3:26   Fabulous. We're in a, you know, a digital age, of course, and technologies, you know, is getting, you know, making a lot of our lifestyle easier in a lot of ways. And you know, and I see you're working around here at DDA, you know, you're reviewing apps and a whole bunch of other things. How is technology, is it making your job sort of easier, or more creative, or how's that working for you?

Keegan Newberry  3:47   Technology has become more accessible. And because of that, it's being embedded into phones and iPads and other devices as base features, which allows for a lot of the tech th