On the 31st January 2023, the world’s leading assistive technology conference took place in Orlando, Florida. ATIA 2023 brought together practitioners, developers, vendors, thought leaders, and of course users of assistive technology for four days of networking and sharing the latest news and best practise.

Antony, Mary, and Sam from Aventido attended ATIA and supported Jonathan Webb from Pro-Study on his exhibition stand showing US customers how Pro-Study can help neurodiverse students with taking the stress out of collecting, organising and referencing research for assignments.

What did the team find out about Pro-Study and the US market?

The most obvious theme that seemed to be mentioned a lot was that of having ADHD and managing the task of undergoing research.

In many ways, an ‘ADHD’ brain is awesome for conducting research in that it can be great for being curious and looking at multiple sources but equally some of the weaknesses that come with ‘ADHD thinking’ can be related to focus, concentration, and organising reference sources effectively for assignments.

In demonstrating Pro-Study to visitors to the stand, the feedback received from them was as follows:

• Being able to collate research into a single multi-platform resource is helpful;

• Being able to collate research and organise using the correct citation format saves time and builds confidence in the task itself;

-Using Pro-Study significantly reduces overwhelm when reading website content as it uses its unique ‘Tiling’ feature to break down large amounts of content into smaller less overwhelming chunks to read;

• Access to printed and electronic formats of text was made easier using the Optical Character Recognition (O.C.R) tool within Pro-Study. O.C.R technology scans a page of text and recognises the content so that it can then be manipulated or read out on a computer;

• A very popular feature was the ability of Pro-Study to output a report of all the research collected using the correct citation format for university purposes which, of course, is a requirement of most university assignments;

• The use of the Project Assist app makes collecting research on the go a straightforward and fun process with all the information collected being accessible across technology platforms.

The video explains how the Pro-Study Project Assist app works in helping students to capture sources of information for their assignments.

Final comments

It was useful for some members of our team to go to the US and gain a deeper understanding of how education works there versus that of here in the UK, especially in terms of the part that assistive technology plays in supporting neurodiverse learning.

If any of the above thoughts resonate with you whether you are a student or an AT practitioner then feel free to get in touch and let us know. We would love to hear from you.

In the meantime, if you would like to know more about Pro-Study then do get in touch with Sam by using the banner below: