3 Product Planning Tips for Alternative Input Devices in edTech

We all want our edTech products to be accessible. 

But strategic planning for edTech products that use alternative input devices, like handwriting or voice recognition, takes additional time and budget to get right.

Across dozens of edTech products and client projects, I’ve always found the planning worth the effort.

After all, using inclusive design patterns in edTech products with alternative input devices is about more than designing a pretty interface, or creating an accessible learning tool. 

Inclusive design for these tools—and the user experience strategy it requires—is a differentiator in a crowded marketplace.

Here’s how to knock your product planning strategy out of the park—and make a business case to leadership for investing in accessible design and technology in your learning tools.

What’s an alternative input device?

According to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, alternative input devices are “a type of assistive technology that replaces a mouse or keyboard (or both).”

These technologies can include:

• Voice recognition
• Screen readers
• Eye-tracking systems
• Modified keyboards

While assistive technologies have advantages for every student, they are also great at supporting students with special needs, including differently abled or neurodivergent learners.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll also talk about alternative inputs more broadly, including:

• Using styluses and handwriting recognition technology
• Incorporating voice recognition technology
• Designing for augmented or virtual reality and tracking gestures, eye movement, and speech recognition

Designing edTech products with alternative input devices isn’t just better for learners with different abilities. These devices benefit all learners and give them even more agency over their learning.

The advantages of designing for alternative input devices in edTech

Learning tools designed with alternative input systems open up a range of possibilities for both teachers and learners.

For example, edTech products with alternative input systems can:

• Listen to a learner read aloud with voice recognition technology
• Assess writing or mathematical thinking with handwriting recognition
• Honor learner agency by providing multiple ways for students to respond to a question

The scalability of this technology also means that teachers can more easily:

• Ensure a student receives immediate feedback and personalized support
• Reach more students with differentiated support in their classroom
• Pinpoint interventions or provide more targeted instruction

Just-in-time student feedback can provide teachers with a richer data snapshot of where each learner is. 

This data becomes useful as teachers plan different levels of instruction for their classroom, including when they might use group or whole-class instruction.

Ultimately, edTech products that provide immediate, nuanced feedback support the needs of neurodivergent learners, as well as students who need higher levels of accessibility.

Timely feedback in alternative input devices also improves the overall usability of your learning tool for all students—and that’s a win-win for everyone.

3 product planning tips for learning tools that use alternative input devices

Planning for your users to interact with learning content using alternative inputs like voice or handwriting recognition takes extra time and thought.

In addition to working closely with your content and editorial teams, you’ll need to include more time for product iteration and user testing.

Here’s how to get it right:

1. Work closely with your content and editorial teams, so you can effectively handle student responses and errors
2. Design with learner agency in mind to improve overall accessibility
3. Give your product team enough time to iterate

Let’s dig in on each of these points more closely.

1. Work closely with your content and editorial teams

Designing interactive, nonlinear experiences requires creative collaboration with a learning and/or curriculum designers.

That goes double if you’re also planning to use technology like handwriting or voice recognition.

Together, your team will need to decide when learning content should be adjusted, or when you change what the learner experience will be.

Handling student responses

As you think about designing for alternative input devices, consider how student input might be less binary than a keystroke or other command.

For example, if your product detects that a student has repeated difficulty reading a word aloud, there will likely be a wealth of information in the recording for teachers to analyze.

This level of detail can help educators identify student challenges and plan interventions.

Of course, measuring correct or incorrect responses is still valuable information for educators, too.

For example, you might decide that a certain number of failed attempts at a question, prompt, or activity indicates that a learner needs intervention.

Can you work with your content team to identify common misconceptions, so you can scaffold your learner back to the rest of where their peers are?

Last but not least, if your product uses an alternative input system, you should also consider whether a learner’s error is related to the hardware. 

Is their microphone or stylus working correctly? Can they be provided with more onboarding or support?

Persistent user errors and refining your UX

Persistent errors from learners may also be a signal that your team needs to refine the user experience. 

The gap between how learners typically interact with your tool and what you need them to do could simply be too great.

After all, setting up users for success is an integral part of UX design. When designing edTech products with alternative inputs, your UX team needs to help users interact with the tool in the right way at the right time.

Working with a specialized UX design team ensures that your product team can accurately solve these challenges for teachers and learners. 

That way, your technology choices and experience design will never get in the way of learning.

2. Design with learner agency in mind

In addition to supporting the needs of neurodivergent learners, alternative input devices give all students the possibility for more agency over their learning.

Learning tools with technologies like handwriting recognition support learning preferences, allowing learners to respond to questions by creating visual media or writing out a response. These forms of student response are often more nuanced and expressive, contributing to product goals for learner agency.

Alternative input design choices also support overall accessibility and usability. edTech products that offer learners multiple means of action or expression can meet or exceed universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines, supporting the needs of all learners.

3. Iterate on edTech product design to ensure accessibility

As you think about different ways to approach accessible edTech product design, your product team should plan for many iterations.

Design iteration is especially important for assessment tools.

For example, even if you give learners straightforward assessment questions, you may inadvertently introduce challenges due to technology.

Once you introduce voice recognition or handwriting technology into a learning product, it’s all too easy for the product to assess the wrong student input.

White noise, human factors like hand pressure, and other variables can throw off any assessment tool if your team hasn’t found a way to account for these variables in design.

There are a few ways to plan for this:

• Onboard both students and teachers in your software by introducing best practices for using these technologies. Remember: using headsets, styluses, or AR-enabled hardware could be a new experience. This should be planned for as part of your overall user experience.
• Break down complex assessments into smaller, more nuanced pieces of content. The more formative your assessment, the better.
• Work closely with your development team. Your engineers will likely be uncovering technical issues or developing prototypes that will require UX changes.
• Build in adaptive learning and design strategy from the beginning. If you start to develop something and decide to make it adaptive later, the technology will be a band-aid at best.

Iterative planning helps in each of these scenarios. After all, the more iterating you do, the stronger edTech product you’ll build!

While planning for these different user experiences potentially requires more time and expense, you’re also developing a learning tool with a high ROI.

Giving learners with learning differences meaningful ways to interact with content makes your learning tool more accessible for everyone. It also makes your product more valuable to teachers and edTech buyers alike.

Making the business case for designing with alternative inputs

Right now, breaking through in the edTech space is about more than data security and interoperability.

If your organization can’t prove that your learning product performs more effectively than your competitors’ tools, you’re going to get lost in the noise.

This effort requires planning and strategy, too. 

Whether you submit your edTech product for third-party validation or show impact at scale in many classrooms, you’ll need to establish credibility with educators in order to build reach.

In fact, big school districts and even state-level buyers, will require this approach for accessible learning tools.

Remember: edTech buyers are making major investments in software suites. 

They require basic, if not advanced accessibility adherence, so it’s easier for them to “futureproof” their technology purchases.

The more you can show your organization’s investment in accessible technology is authentically designed and planned, the easier time your sales team will have meeting their needs.

With smart investments in accessible design, positioning, and credibility, you’ll see an explosion in impact—and break through the noise.

Accessible learning tools that use technologies like handwriting and voice recognition provide richer, more engaging experiences for students with learning differences.

They also ensure that your product works better for everyone and give students more agency in their technology use.

Are you product planning for a unique, accessible learning tool? Learn more about how we used handwriting recognition technology in Starwriter, a Webby-recognized app for teaching handwriting to young learners.