ABOUT US

ELTL believes that the scientific enquiry of equitable learning technologies must be informed through collaboration, community-based engagement and cross-disciplinary working while placing people with neurodiversity at the forefront of our endeavors. This will help to ensure the most pressing problems facing neurodiverse communities are tackled within a multi-disciplinary environment while creating an exceptional academic environment for our research and teaching communities.

The process of establishing what technology could or should do for neurodiverse groups is significantly limited and often excludes them from the process of designing or formulating research agendas in this field. This is additionally compounded by issues of access to, and community engagement with, researchers and designers. In sum, the field of equitable technologies demands urgent attention related to listening to, and working with, people with neurodiversity. ELTL positions itself at the core of these endeavours to help improve people’s lives through technology; placing people central to our work.

As a result of the challenges facing this field, the aims of the ELTL mean we:

engage and include people with neurodiversity to enable access to technologies in community-based environments;
enable and empower people with neurodiversity to inform decisions related to technology development that could impact them most;
provide a means for people with neurodiversity to discuss ideas and feed into research about/with them; and
establish a diverse stakeholder network to enable a co-design and participatory approach in designing technologies that support diverse user needs.

The work of ELTL and its members was featured in UF’s Explore Research magazine (spring 2023 edition); profiling the work we’re doing that places autistic people at the forefront of our research endeavors