Dr. Coombs.  Welcome to EASI, Equal Access to Software and Information, with our regular Internet webcast.  We have two special interview guests with us here today, special in part because they are Canadians.  I was born in Canada and when I last I didn't leave with any animosity.  I still have a very, very warm spot in my heart for Canada and my Canadian friends.  So we are proud to have a webcast that expands beyond the U.S. borders.  We love to reach out to the rest of the world.  That is the fun thing about the Internet; it is the World Wide Web.  And so we have from Montreal Catherine Fitchton, Dr. Catherine Fitchton.

Dr. Fitchton. Hi Norm.

Dr. Coombs.  And one of her ex students who has moved on and graduated, Jenison Asuncion.  Good morning Jenison.

Dr. Asuncion.  Good morning Norm from Toronto.  And for those who might not be familiar with it, Toronto is about seven hours by car from Montreal.  And I am in the province of Ontario.  So good morning.

Dr. Coombs.  Well I said good morning, but it is good afternoon where you guys are.  I am in California and Dick is in Wisconsin, so we are spanning the continent for this webcast.  Dick is our good Web guru, good morning Dick.

Mr. Banks.  Good morning Norm, and Catherine and Jenison good morning.  I do not want to get off on a tangent but I would like to congratulate Canada for getting the gold in skating.  I was thrilled and I just wanted the world to know that.

Dr. Coombs.  With this will be broadcast with the Olympics behind us.  We are actually recording it in the middle of the Olympics, and there was a little bit of a hubbub about the figure skating.  Catherine, would you tell us a bit about yourself and particularly about your professional affiliations in Montreal?  And maybe talk a little bit to introduce the kind of research that you do.  We will come back to that in detail, but just give a little intro about yourself and your work.

Dr. Fitchton.  Sure Norm I would love to.  I am in Montreal as you mentioned.  I wear many hats.  Something that is common to all my hats is that I am a psychologist.  As a psychologist I teach at Dawson College.  I have been teaching there for many years with a variety of courses.  I also have a faculty appointment at McGill University in the Department of Psychiatry.  And I also do research and I practice at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.  So I guess I kind of do a lot of things.  But one thing that kind of runs through my whole professional life is my love for research.  And this is how I ended up co directing the Adaptec project together with Jenison and Maria Barelli, who is a social worker and disability activist.  And among the three of us we co direct the Adaptec project with a focus in the last five or six years has really been on computer technology needs of a variety of people primarily students with disabilities in postsecondary education.

Dr. Coombs.  Okay.  That makes us a good team because Dick and I, while we are interested in research, our passion is dissemination.  So we come together well here.  So Jenison, how did you get from Montreal to Toronto?

Dr. Asuncion.  It is an interesting story.  I will encapsulate it very briefly.  Just a quick question, I did not have the opportunity to take any courses from Catherine.  However I have known Catherine off and on for the past twelve years.  Throughout my postsecondary education I was heavily involved in student advocacy with regard to accessibility issues.  I am blind myself so I have a vested interest in all means of access.  So at the college level, which is where I met Catherine at Dawson College.  When I left Dawson and entered University I got involved at the national level with an organization called NEADS, the National Educational Association of Disabled Students, which is an across Canada disability student group.  And I served in an executive position for four years, and then I locked up an advisory role right now.  Just as a side note, Adaptec and NEADS are closely linked.  Adaptec is seen by me as the technological advocate, if you will, within Canada for colleges and universities and students with disabilities.  So that is the advocacy background.  So Catherine and I met will sitting on a college task force back in 1991.  So she kept tabs on me, as any interested professor would with all his or her students at the college level.  I have been involved in computers and technologies also, both mainstream and adaptive technologies.  I have done a lot of computer training on both ends, from the high-tech stuff.  This was way back when DOS was still king.  But certainly network security, and then on the adaptive side I was helping train people on how to use adaptive technology.  I decided to formalize all that interest in training by undertaking a master's degree in 1997 in educational technology at Concorde University.  However my specialization now was on the corporate end, to design delivery and management of corporate training and performance systems.  Of course however with an eye on accessibility, being user myself.  Most recently I spent a year here with IBM here in Toronto.  I came to Toronto to seek some other opportunities all the meanwhile staying on with Adaptec.  Again just to backtrack for a second I officially joined Adaptec in 1997 so I am coming on five years with Adaptec.  So I did my year at IBM.  I left IBM and now I am at the Bank of Montreal in their training department.  And one of my assignments is looking at positioning our Bank, the Bank of Montreal, as being a leader in making corporate wide computer-based training and distributive learning accessible to all employees including the employees with disabilities both here and in the US.  So my interests are in training, my interests are in access.  I like many aspects of research, except, as Catherine will probably chuckle about this, and the actual number crunching and the statistical aspect of it.  I understand it and can do it, but I prefer to help with a survey construction, although the development, help support the team in project management roles, and also to help with the dissemination.  So I like everything except looking very carefully at the heavy-duty statistical tables etc.

Dr. Coombs.  Well I take it that if you are working for the Bank of Montreal in Toronto, that the Bank of Montreal is a national bank?  Is that correct?

Dr. Asuncion.  The Bank of Montreal is the oldest bank in Canada.  We have our Chairman sitting here in Toronto, however we still have a large presence in Montreal.  We also own a large number of interests in the United States, including Harrison Chicago.  Which makes this accessibility issue with distributive learning more of an imperative, especially on U.S. side because of Section 508.  But I do not want to stray too far away from the Adaptec side of this.  What is interesting though at least in terms of parallels there is a lot of lessons that we have learned about and researched about in postsecondary education I certainly things that crossover.  There I lessons that can be taken on the corporate side in training and certainly we could devote another webcast just to that particular topic.

Dr. Coombs.  Okay, thank you Jenison. I am a cultural historian by trade.  Or was, I have pretty much changed careers now.  But I am aware that almost everything as a cultural context in which some things are similarly carryover from one culture to another and others are unique to that culture.  So I am interested in what he can tell us about the Canadian projects.  Adaptec as I understand it, focuses on access to technology through the use of adaptive technology.  And you are focusing on postsecondary institutions in Canada.  So what ways do you see the Canadian context as being similar or different?  Let me so that you first Catherine?

Dr. Fitchton.  I would rather defer to Jenison’s expertise.  When he did not bother telling you is that he also has a degree in political science, with a special interest in cross-border relations.  So why don't I leave this one for Jenison now.

Dr. Asuncion.  One of the things that makes Canada unique or different from the US, and of course we have a lot of international listeners as well, so some of what I'm going to say in terms of the characteristics of Canada might hold true especially with the Commonwealth countries. We have 10 provinces in three territories.  A lot of responsibilities are decentralized in Canada, which is different from the United States.  For example education is a provincial matter, which the implications for that for students with disabilities are with regard to funding.  Different provinces offer different levels of funding support for students with disabilities to a. pay for tuition and books, and b. to cover the use of adaptive technology.  I'll give you an example.  In the province of Quebec were Adaptec is based, students with disabilities who are qualified and who meet the qualifications can gain access to specialize computers and adaptive technologies that are on a list that are approved through the Quebec government.  And they are allowed to use the equipment throughout the postsecondary education, and in fact throughout their elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educations.  Where I am now in Ontario the program is little different.  In Ontario, as I understand it now, students with disabilities are able to access to same equipment however there is a cost-sharing mechanism involved.  In Quebec the student does not have to pay anything.  In Ontario you pay up to 25 percent of the costs related to covering the computer and adaptive technology, and they needed to keep these technologies for life.  So there are some differences.  Any qualities if you will, or these differences in these programs are things that we did focus on as part of our research.  They are also a bilingual country, predominantly Franklephone and Quebec.  We have microphone communities also in Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, Prince Edward Island, and a lot in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well.  So it adds another interesting component.  Another example of how issues are different from Providence to Providence, for a long time and I am speaking of the past because things are evolving and moving past.  But for a longer period of time to Providence of Quebec learning disabilities that recognized as a disability by the provincial government for funding.  Things are slowly changing.  I am not sure to the degree they have changed at this point.  But it also plays into a student with a learning disability being able to access equipment.  Which was different from say a student with a disability in New Brunswick whereas we understand it in New Brunswick some learning disabilities are recognized in terms of funding so that the student can for example get a laptop and claim it as medical expense.

Dr. Coombs.  Well this is our second interview with you good Canadian folk.  We did one on an earlier research study you had done with Adaptec and postsecondary work.  I was wondering Catherine if you could just briefly summarized what the first project showed?  And a spell out why he did a second one and what was the reason for doing second one?

Dr. Fitchton.  I would be delighted to.  Our first study, which really we consider to be a landmark investigation, mostly because of a large number of postsecondary students with disabilities who participated, the goal of that project, and you can read all about it on our web page, which is www.adaptech.org.  The goal over there was to find out what exactly is the situation for postsecondary students with disabilities in Canada.  And that study we had over 100 students with disabilities who completed a rather large survey, we also had focus groups and open-ended survey questions that people responded to.  And they gave us a good idea about what kinds of issues that based, what kinds of technologies they used, what works well, and what were some of the problems.  And it was based on the findings of the study that we have conducted our latest study which we call DSS Focus, because in involved disability service providers.  We kind of feel that the disability service providers are the second part of the equation.  The first part, and the most important part for us are the students.  But the folks that are busy providing support for them are also important because depending on their needs and priorities services, equipment, and adaptations, are or are not made available.  So a find our latest study, which we call DSS Focus, to be a companion to our previous study.  Here are goal was to evaluate campus based disability service providers computer and technology concerns and needs.  One of our goals was to evaluate how the institutions themselves, infrastructure, equipment, faculty education, relations between disability service providers and the information technology folks on campus and other campus departments, facilitates learning or inhibits it for students with disabilities.  We have always worked on trust disability issues so we're interested in computer applications and adaptations for students with every kind of disability, certainly including learning disabilities, as well as visual impairments, neural muscular motor things, and so on.  One of the populations by the way that we found particularly underserved by technology has been students with hearing impairments.  This is an area that really needs a great deal of development.  At any rate the closest study was to evaluate institutional concerns.  We also thought about taking a look of faculty and staff with disabilities.  One of the things that happened is that although people when they were students were receiving reasonably good services while they were students, when they graduated and became faculty or staff at the very same institutions all of a sudden any support and access they had dried up.  A lot professor at one of the universities, we were sitting on a grant committee together and she was blind, she said until I graduated I had lots of help.  People would scan my books and I had lots of assistance.  Now that I have been teaching I get to pay for all of this myself.  So that hardly seems fair or appropriate to us.  So in our current study we also investigated at least the beginnings of what is the situation with faculty with disabilities.

Dr. Coombs.  All that is interesting.  I was a faculty person with a disability.  I found that in many ways to be true.  The support services tend to come out of the branch of student affairs.  So if you are not a student you not qualify for them.  On the other hand I suppose as a faculty person I have a little more income and it makes it easier to pick up some of that.  But that is interesting.  One other follow-up question, some of our listeners may be more research orientated then I am and so they make really want to know something about the methodology that you are using in this study.  Could you comment on that a little bit?

Dr. Fitchton.  Share, methodology is something very close to my heart.  I figure without decent methodology, the results are not worth; well I do not think one can say this on a public medium.  So I am very concerned with methodology.  So this is what we did.  In the spring of the year 2000 we conducted a structured interview.  We had 38 questions and we used Liche Rich Scaling.  This is the familiar kind of scale to many of your listeners where you make an attitude statement.  My college supports me in my endeavors to provide students with disabilities adequate computer technologies, and you may either strongly disagree or agree with this.  The agree disagree scale is typically on a six point scale, with one meaning strongly disagree and six meaning strongly agree.  So this is what we use.  We decided he is a telephone survey, well we e-mailed, faxed, mailed, the questions to our interviewees ahead of time.  We did not wanted to say when we call them that they needed time to think about it or I have to talk to somebody.  I also wanted to let them know that the questions were reasonably straightforward and fairly short.  Our interviews lasted anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes.  156 disability service providers provided answers.  Now what we are really proud of is that this is a percent to the disability service providers in all of Canada's colleges and universities.  And I have to say that this 80 percent rate is thanks in very large part to Jenison’s tenacity.  What else can tell you about this?  We had wonderful collaboration from CADSPIPE. CADSPIPE was one of our partners.  CADSPIP is the Canadian association of disability service providers in postsecondary education.  This is a Canadian equivalent of your organization called AHEAD.  And being our partners they both influenced the questions that we asked, and have been involved in dissemination and in publicizing our study.  And also one of the things that I think is responsible for this high return rate, which really makes study very valid, is the fact that the disability service providers have been interested in the topic.  Computer technology and services in this area for students with disabilities is a developing area in most colleges and universities.

Dr. Coombs.  Was the methodology and both studies pretty much the same?  I am not quite clear on the difference between the two studies.

Dr. Asuncion.  If I could chime in here with regards to the first point you may Norm.  The methodology in our first study where we focus on students was a little different in that it involved three different survey instruments.  And Catherine can certainly pick up after.  We had focus groups, we had structured telephone interviews, and we had a closed and a questionnaire, which was actually mailed out.  So that was more of a traditional survey if you will.  If I could just the to the methodology a little bit insofar as saying something else that we did that your listeners would be interested in terms of trying to ensure that our questions were solid is we pilot tested different versions of the survey implemented by various individuals in the service provision field because the wanted to make sure that the terminology was terminology that they could understand.  And also to say that in the province of Quebec we got a great deal of support from the eastern and western Quebec associations of college service provisions.  And Catherine maybe you might want to comment a little bit more on the similarities or differences of the methodology for our student study, and our DSS Focus.

Dr. Fitchton.  In case you're waiting for me I do not really have anything to add.  I think Jenison summarized things admirably.  The studies had fairly different methodology is, but ultimately much the same goal.

Dr. Coombs.  Okay, that is interesting.  So this is a picture of how you went about your work.  The 80 percent feedback that you mentioned is certainly very impressive.  Usually if you do email survey you're lucky if you get 10 percent.  So that it certainly adds a great deal of significance to whatever findings you have.  It is probably best to move on to findings.  And I think you both need to figure out how best to break down the findings, to approach them in a meaningful manner for us.  And I think what I will do is I will do it to both of you and let you kick the ball back and forth between the two of you for a little while as to who talks about which findings.  Seeing as Catherine likes methodology, maybe Jenison likes findings.  Do you want to start out Jenison and ask some specific questions of Catherine?  I will let you guys talk about findings for a bit.

Dr. Asuncion.  As Catherine did with the discussion about dictating content, I am going again to divert to Catherine here.  The research findings themselves speak to the way we structured the questions in the methodology.  And perhaps she might be better able to provide context around the hypotheses we were trying to prove.  Certainly I will chime in, but Catherine?

Dr. Fitchton.  For our findings?  Give me a computer, lots of numbers, and a bunch of tables, and I can be happy for days on end.  So I will give you some of the highlights.  Clearly in an interview like this we're not going to tell you all the little details.  And I will try not to worry with little numbers.  But you might be interested in knowing that about two-thirds of the disability service providers in Canada are women.  They have about 10 years of experience; some most of them are fairly well experienced in providing services to students with disabilities.  What troubles us to is that most of them indicated that they are really not very knowledgeable about computer technologies used by students with disabilities.  This expertise is rapidly becoming a necessity.  So it means that time and money are going to have to be invested in professional development opportunities.  The Jenison, do you want to talk a bit about professional opportunities, professional development, before I move on?

Dr. Coombs.  I will chime in for a second here before Jenison picks up.  We would agree in the states that, I do not know the gender ratios, but certainly the disabled student service staff has done a good job over the years.  But most of them do not have a lot of computer background.  And this is becoming increasingly important.  And of course that is what we have to do with our on-line workshops is fill this kind of gap for exactly these people.  We have a new workshop beginning shortly called Train The Trainer.  And this will really fit in very much to help those kinds of people.  So I hope you will take a look at our workshop page.  Sorry Jenison, you taken now.

Dr. Asuncion.  Again I will leave a large part of the discussion to Catherine.  But because I conducted a lot of interviews I will say that a lot of the providers, as Catherine indicated, although they did not have a lot of experience there was an interest and a recognized need to have some expertise.  We should back that my saying that when we conducted interviews we asked to speak to the director and or Coordinator of whatever services for being provided for students with disabilities on the college or university campus.  Keeping that in mind, a lot of the larger universities also have adaptive technologies which could also reflect on some of the answer is that we got.  The fact that the top-level director did not have as much technical expertise did not take away from the service provision levels because there was not adaptive technology.  And just to give a little story, it was interesting because some time some of the providers would indicate to us by phone that they had consulted with their adaptive technologists in answering some of the questions.  And in some instances I would conduct the team interview where there were a couple of people in the room and they would actually discuss their responses.  That was an interesting turn of events, which provides a healthy conversation.  Now getting back to the professional development opportunities, this was closely tied to issues of budgets.  We asked questions about financial support for disabilities services, which those in the field know that if there is any money to go into training and development is probably not that much because a lot of that money has to go to invest in the student services themselves.  So it is not unlike other student service departments within the college or university that money was definitely tied to it but the interest was certainly there among the people we spoke to in terms of wanting to know the technology.  At least so that if an adaptive technologist was not around they would be able to maybe troubleshooter little bit with JAWS.  Catherine did you want to comment more in the professional development area?  I'm sorry, in terms of professional development one of the questions we also did ask on the front was about faculty professional development.  And we asked whether issues of accessibility were being covered when faculty were being trained on the use of various technologies in their teaching.  And Catherine maybe you would like to start by talking about those results?

Dr. Fitchton.  Regrettably I would.  One of the things that the service providers did when we asked them whether they were involved in faculty development issues when it came to training faculty on computer technology.  Not only where they not invited, but also some of them laughed.  They found it difficult that we could even ask such a question.  It has never occurred to anybody to invite disability service providers, or an adaptive technologist, to talk to faculty.  This is something that is clearly going to have to change in the very near future.  One of the things that I found interesting, and I continue to find interesting, is nobody is really sure how many students there are with disabilities in the system.  One difficulty of this is, and there are in a whole bunch of mythological reasons for this, is the only thing is that people have available tend to be from disability service providers at least in much of the literature.  We can always do a freshman survey, but there have not been any in Canada.  So what we typically found was that on average two and a half to three and a half percent of Canadians postsecondary secondary students have a disability and I registered with their disability service providers.  We have reason to believe that this is really in many ways to tip of the iceberg and that there are three to four times as many students with disabilities on campus as are known to disability service providers.  So it is finally estimate that there are well over one hundred thousand students in Canada with disabilities.  Given that the states have about ten times as much, we're talking about close to one million students with disabilities or more on the North American continent, which is a very large group of individuals and a very important segment of society, a very substantial segment of society.  So what did we find about the actual situation of computers on Canadian campuses?  Service providers indicated that computer related services are a more directly important priority.  This I think is going to change in the upcoming years has campuses become more and more technologically inclusive if you will.  Almost all colleges and universities now are trying to have on-line education.  Of course authoring tools are being used at our Web enabled.  And I think it is going to be almost impossible.  Registration is not on-line.  It is going to be almost impossible for somebody to function on the college or university campus without good computer access.  We found that most of the institutions had some kind of adaptive technologies for students on campus, software that reads what is on the screen, adaptive microphones, and so on.  Junior and community colleges, the two-year colleges, were less likely to have this kind of equipment and universities.  Well as dismaying to us was we asked does your institution have a multidisciplinary committee that deals with computer accessibility?  And what we found was that only one-fourth of the institutions in Canada had such a committee.  And that although there were students with disabilities and disability service providers, and sometimes even faculty on such committees, and virtually none of these committees were, that is not true maybe 20 percent, had representation from computer services staff.  Now this is a real problem.  Because if information technology continues to be an important priority, then having these types of committees then having representation from the IT community on campus is going to be vital.  Such committees would also allow for him are prominent role for computer adaptations for students with disabilities and they could go a long way to ensuring that disabilities or professionals have adequate backup and adequate infrastructure.  Jenison would you like to anything to this before I ramble on about findings?

Dr. Asuncion.  I wanted to talk very briefly about this issue of the computer committees.  Virtually every college university in Canada has either an instructional technology committee, a distributed learning committee, an educational technology committee, committees with various names but they all deal with implementation, management, and development, of information technology infrastructure which will provide learning opportunities.  Those committees very rarely have representation from anyone within disabilities services.  We get comments in our questionnaires like there might be a mainstream committee, but we have never been on it.  So we might have our own committee, but there is very rarely cross representation, crossbreeding if you will.  It is also important to note, and it is probably the same in the states, that when it comes to issues of disability is often confusing whether it is IT committees or IT departments, or the registrar's office.  It is very easy for them to say that this is a disability issue, send it to the disability office.  Of course one of the things that we are advocating for, which our results are clearly showing in which we know EASI is definitely behind, is this idea of this being a holistic issue.  Because the expertise in the implementation and delivery of educational and instructional technology lies within the experts within those particular departments.  If the campus is lucky there is an adaptive technologist.  But there are certainly some people on campus who have disability and accessibility issues and the subject matter expertise could be brought into those committees.  You know and that conversations at the end of the questionnaire when service providers would be expressing some of their frustrations and some of where they felt their hands were tied they understood that information technology and educational technology was being delivered across curriculum, but they were not being invited to the tables.  And certainly we are hoping that some of those individuals that are listening in the audience can understand that this is critical.  Especially in United States were there is legislation, but here in Canada as well and everywhere else because it is the right thing to do.  And clearly, in our global and knowledge-based economy, where anyone from clerical staff straight through to engineers, lawyers, etc., are expected to have a level of computer knowledge and skills.  And these offerings of courses providing technological learning components, whether it is on-line tutorials, or calculus labs, etc., those are places where students are getting this type of acumen.  And if students with disabilities are not being that access, and if people who are in a position to provide services for students with disabilities are not being invited to the table, the decisions around these very trends are being made.  There are some serious implications there that frankly I do not think any of us really want to speculate on so far as to say that they are not good and that we would be going backwards.  And so that is something in terms of implication.  And before I start rambling I will turn things back to Catherine, might want to talk a little bit more about a couple of other interesting findings.

Dr. Coombs.  Sorry, but I am going to cut in.  We come back to the topic of cultural history and culture.  And I think one of the problems I have seen with all students.  In that they cannot shuffle them off to one department, and there is really a multidisciplinary problem including faculty in general and certainly would include the computer department and some others.  So there is a tendency to want to ghettoize all the problems with disabilities, get them out of your hair, and pretend they do not exist instead of taking any responsibility.  I see this is one of your major findings.  We all sort of new that, and for the most part what we have been functioning with is coming to all these conclusions by the seat of our pants.  What you guys are doing is putting real hard-core statistics and numbers on it.  So we're running short on time here, I think we would like to wind up this interview.  And we will be having a follow-up interview a little bit later.  Catherine do you want to start summarizing some of these findings, and then we will pick up for next time?

Dr. Fitchton.  Sure I would love to.  I guess one question is how overall are the needs of students with disabilities and their technology related needs being met?  The answer was moderately well.  This was true in institutions surprisingly enough where there was lots of computer technology.  And it was also true for institutions that had minimal or close to no technology.  For the answer to how this is possible?  Tune in next time.

Dr. Coombs.  Okay.  Jenison do you have anything to wind up comments?

Dr. Asuncion.  Actually I would like to throwback to Catherine and have her maybe quickly speaks to a finding or to which came from our phone calls.  Because I think from a cultural perspective, and from a Canadian perspective, I think it is very important.  And maybe we could close on that.

Dr. Fitchton.  Because we live and work in Quebec on the Adaptec project, well Jenison used to.  We work in Quebec and he no longer does.  We have become very sensitive to the needs of the Franklephone majority.  On English side, which is most of Canada, maybe six or so million folks, we have the advantage of your legislation and all of the wonderful American products that have been developed.  Quebec, in part because of its geographical location has become the how about a Franklephone world for computer technology development.  Because of the whole North American emphasis on computer technologies, Quebec being a part of North America has been a natural ally of the North American movement. This is meant that most of the new exciting developments in the French world as far as computer technologies go has been done in Quebec.  Regrettably the development of computer technologies that are adaptive have not really kept pace.  And this is been a problem for Franklephone students who really make up the majority of postsecondary students in Quebec.  One of the things that we're trying to address with our project is we make sure that we always to a comparison with Quebec versus other provinces and we tried to get our research findings out to people that matter in all of the related communities, I guess these are called stakeholders in the land of research and development.  We try to make sure that the absence of technologies that work well in French for students with disabilities is known and that there are recommendations for what can be done about this.

Dr. Asuncion.  In terms of Quebec, I have mentioned that there are Francophone communities across Canada including community colleges in Ontario.  I regrettably did not talk a little bit more about the postsecondary structure.  However because the majority of our results from the Franklephone side did come from Quebec, a little like to say that we did speak to Franklephone service providers in New Brunswick as well as in Ontario.  And they gave us similar information.  However because they were any predominantly English speaking provinces, students for accessing technologies in English.  One or to other little things that I would like to close off on is when Catherine reference to us using Section 508 that does not mean that we are actually using it as a piece of legislation here in Canada.  What we are doing is looking at as a model because it is all written in English.  None of this has been translated into French.  We have the luxury of seeing how the legislation is written out and adapting some of the guidelines.  And for those people who care, Canada's population this year was 30 million.

Dr. Coombs.  I'm not sure it is fair or proper to compare the situation of the Latino community in the states to that of Francofone in Canada.  But I am not aware of anyone really dealing with adaptive technology in the Latino community in the states.  And I am interested in looking into that when I have some time, which I never seem to have.  But I see this as a neglected area.  And I suppose we can assume that most Hispanics when they get to college are reasonably adaptive English so we can ignore the problem, somehow that does not feel correct for me.  So I am interested in your struggle with this issue.  And I think it is one that we should take a.  The states.  I also want to again think you guys for doing the hard statistics.  The fundraisers and the grant providers will being much more impressed to see some hard numbers then just our general impression even if our impressions are right.  So you are doing a great favor for us and maybe we can take some of your instruments and apply versions of it to some of your studies.  I know Catherine is interested in doing a cross-reference study.  So hopefully that will come online.  So we will have another interview in which we summarize findings again.  We will start looking at some of the other projects you have been doing, your plans for the future, and some general discussion.  I hope people tune into that later.  Thank you very much and we will talk you again soon.