Toshimitsu Yamaguchi
Niigata City Disabled People’s ICT Support Centre/ Niigata University

Outline of the Centre

(1) Overview of our activities

Niigata City Disabled People’s ICT Support Centre is an ICT support centre established in 2008, with our activities based on Niigata University’s Ikarashi Campus. Niigata University runs the centre under commission from Niigata City, and we provide information about, fitting of, trial loans of, and trainings on assistive technologies for all types of disability. With one full-time and two part-time staff, we act as a resource centre for assistive technologies promoting the independence and social participation of disabled people.

(2) Recent use of the Centre

I would like to introduce the usage of our Centre in the 2022 fiscal year. Broken down by methods of consultation, the largest category was outbound visits. These 204 visits included going to users in their homes, hospitals, or schools to provide support. This was followed by 101 email and 104 telephone consultations, while there were 77 trainings and 31 research and survey activities by the Centre. There were also 30 visits to the Centre for advice.

If we look at the ratios of usage according to disability, 22.1% of users had visual impairments, 33.5% had physical disabilities, 15.8% had intellectual disabilities, 7.0% had developmental disabilities, 0.6% had hearing impairments, 0.4% had mental disorders, and 20.6% did not have a disability. We can see that consultations by visually impaired or physically disabled people together make up the majority of cases.

Distinctive activities

Since our Centre is based in a single room at the University, it is not suited to the creation of a showroom which a large number of visitors can visit at will. Therefore, we have made outreach activities, in which we go to where people with disabilities are, the core of our work. We provide support for people with disabilities, in collaboration with other professions, and are focusing our efforts on technology transfer to professionals. I will introduce some distinctive activities here.

(1) Support activities in partnership with hospitals

We carry out activities in partnership with several medical facilities within Niigata City; here, I will introduce our partnership with the Division of Opthalmology and Visual Science at Niigata University Medical & Dental Hospital. A vision support outpatient clinic, specializing in low vision care, is held here every Friday. On the last Friday of the month, the author visits on behalf of our Centre, and offers information about assistive technologies to patients with visual impairments, together with the opthalmologists and orthoptists. We aim to see around six patients a day, spending about one hour with each person, and introduce ways of adjusting smartphone, tablet, or computer settings to suit their vision, as well as apps and software.

With patients of school age, we also introduce audio textbooks which they could use at school and ICT equipment to help them with their studies. We sometimes have their teachers attend the consultation with them, and think together about how to conduct lessons or examinations. 

Since we set aside ample time for these consultations, we can carry out the entire process there in the consulting room, from setting up devices to practicing simple tasks, making this a chance for patients to encounter assistive technologies in the course of their regular hospital visits.

In regional cities, where transport access is less convenient than in major cities, this kind of support model works extremely well. I think that these support activities show the advantage of setting up our Centre inside a university.

(2) Support activities in partnership with special needs education

Assistive technologies are essential in order to allow children with disabilities to realise things which everyone takes for granted, such as participating in their studies, being evaluated, and deciding on their progression routes under fair conditions.

Regular visits to special needs schools are carried out in a variety of formats, according to the needs of the individual schools and students. We provide a wide range of support, from class observations and feedback for teachers to matching assistive technologies to children and students.

We are also involved with support for children and students belonging to mainstream classes through special needs classrooms and so on. In particular, we are providing knowhow about how to make use of personal devices such as iPads and Chromebooks, which have suddenly become widespread through the promotion of the GIGA Schools policy, as assistive technologies for those with developmental disabilities. Our Centre’s role is to support the use of GIGA Schools devices from a different perspective than that of the ICT support staff assigned to schools.

(3) Training work

Trainings are the part of our work in which we deliver information about assistive technologies to more citizens. The main target groups are the medical personnel and teachers whose work brings them into contact with disabled people. We hope that by transferring our knowledge and information to those in various professions through training courses with focused target groups, the participants will immediately be able to make use of the knowledge which they have learned in their work. In order to deliver information about assistive technologies to as many of the city’s residents as possible within our budgetary limits, our centre accords particular importance to these training activities. In FY 2022, we carried out 77 face-to-face training sessions in response to requests, training a total of 1,369 people.

The trainings cover a broad range of topics. For teachers, these include switch toys for children and students with severe or multiple disabilities and the use of GIGA School devices for children and students with reading or writing disabilities, while those aimed at medical personnel include the introduction of “communication devices for severely disabled people” and the use of computer, smartphones, or tablets for visually impaired people.

Since FY 2020, when the impact of COVID-19 made face-to-face trainings difficult, we have started to stream videos on YouTube (https://youtube.com/@ATtvjp). By May 2023, we had uploaded over 100 videos, and these had been watched more than 50,000 times. We intend to continue adding to and upgrading these videos as one of the sources of information on new assistive technologies.

Conclusion – the ICT Support Centre as an intermediary

At the end of the day, the most important thing is putting assistive technologies into the hands of the people who need them.

Even if excellent assistive technologies are developed, the full value of these products will not be utilized if they do not reach the people who need them. Many things make it difficult for disabled people to seek out the most suitable assistive technologies for themselves on their own, and so we believe that intermediaries who can deliver appropriate assistive technologies to those who need them are required.

Although our country has a social welfare system and there are grants to buy equipment, it is necessary to gather information and actually try out products in order to confirm which suit you. Now that IT equipment has become one of the necessities of life, and related assistive technologies have become increasingly important, it can be said that the existence of these intermediaries is even more necessary than ever.

I do not know whether we will continue in existence as an independent facility along the lines of the ICT Support Centre, or whether we will be incorporated into medical or educational settings. Whichever the case may be, I believe that the intermediary function will remain essential and should be continued in some format.

Edited and published by the Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of Persons with Disabilities. Published on June 25th, 2023.