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BACKGROUND: A collaborative approach is critical in inclusive research and should incorporate taking time to build relationships with co-researchers based on trust and shared understanding. Involvement can often be seen as tokenistic and in order to avoid this, it is important to provide opportunities for people to exercise choice throughout the research process. MAIN BODY: The current paper outlines learnings from a co-researcher training process for young people with disabilities to identify the ways in which meaningful choice can be facilitated with this group. While conducting training of co-researchers in topics such as research methods, we were continuously led by the group with regards to the directions that the sessions took and promoted problem solving with the group to accommodate the unique needs of all members. The overall aim of a wider project was to develop research capacity in a group of young people with disabilities through co-researcher training and this paper will report on learnings from this work with regards to how we sought to provide opportunities for the co-researchers to exercise choice within research projects. Feedback from the group of young people highlighted the variety of needs and expectations that must be accommodated in such a process and therefore, allowing them to dictate the extent and manner of their engagement is key. Young people with disabilities are a heterogeneous group and therefore, some methodologies and ways of working required adaptation in order to facilitate meaningful choice and engagement for all. CONCLUSION: Providing meaningful opportunities for demonstrating their choices, in relation to elements of research projects, is a critical component of facilitating a rights-based approach when conducting co-research and requires researchers to cede some level of control over the research process to co-researchers. This can be difficult to achieve in practice and researchers must continuously reflect on their own practice and be willing to change and adapt throughout the process.

It is very important that all members of society can be part of research teams so that researchers can develop projects that will provide good outcomes, however, not all people with disabilities have opportunities to take part in research projects. This project supported a group of young people with disabilities to develop research skills through a set of workshops and this paper describes what the researchers learned from these workshops. This paper will help researchers to understand how best to capture the voices of this population for future research. Young people with disabilities are all different and must be supported to give their opinion in the way that suits them best. Researchers must always think about the ways that they work and change how they work if it is not good for supporting young people with disabilities to work with them on research projects.

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Rapid developments in technology, coinciding with the shift in educational ideology towards the inclusion of children with multiple disabilities, has led to increased calls for a Universal Design (UD) approach to promoting, user-friendly, proactive, transparent, and accessible environments and to the importance of Assistive Technology (AT) applications. For children with disabilities, technologies provide opportunities for greater and more flexible access to activities then traditional interfaces if applied and matched successfully. Relatively high abandonment rates of assistive technology have been documented, often due to a lack of user involvement in the assessment process. The field of Universal Design is showing that collaborative approaches enable users to be active participants and enhance their engagement in activities and social inclusion. This paper provides a background to AT service provision in Ireland and outlines the adaptation of the Irish Matching Person with Technology (IMPT) tool from text based to a multimodal digital format for children with disabilities through a universal design approach.

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Assistive technology (AT) is a powerful enabler of participation. The World Health Organization's Global Collaboration on Assistive Technology (GATE) programme is actively working towards access to assistive technology for all. Developed through collaborative work as a part of the Global Research, Innovation and Education on Assistive Technology (GREAT) Summit, this position paper provides a "state of the science" view of AT users, conceptualized as "People" within the set of GATE strategic "P"s. People are at the core of policy, products, personnel and provision. AT is an interface between the person and the life they would like to lead. People's preferences, perspectives and goals are fundamental to defining and determining the success of AT. Maximizing the impact of AT in enabling participation requires an individualized and holistic understanding of the value and meaning of AT for the individual, taking a universal model perspective, focusing on the person, in context, and then considering the condition and/or the technology. This paper aims to situate and emphasize people at the centre of AT systems: we highlight personal meanings and perspectives on AT use and consider the role of advocacy, empowerment and co-design in developing and driving AT processes.

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Providing an inclusive educational setting for children with disabilities is essential if they are to truly benefit from mainstream education. Universal design (UD) provides a framework to develop our classrooms, materials and methods to accommodate diverse learners and students with special educational needs without the need to retrofit or remove the student from the classroom. This paper outlines the theory and the approach of two training courses on Universal Design developed for teachers and students.

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PURPOSE: To describe a measure and its performance specific to the relationship of personal factors and subjective well-being (SWB) to the use of assistive technology devices (ATDs). The primary hypothesis is that responses to a 33-item personal factors scale and a 12-item SWB scale are good indicators of an individual's predisposition for using, and subsequent match with, a given ATD. METHODS: Data analyses from a number of studies using the 33-item personal factors and the 12-item SWB scales of the Assistive Technology Device Predisposition Assessment with persons of various ages and types of disabilities. RESULTS: Regardless of type of disability or age of respondent, the ATD PA personal factors and the SWB scales identified important differences in predispositions to use an ATD as well as the subsequent quality of the match of person and device. CONCLUSIONS: A quantifiable relationship exists between the ATD PA's measure of personal factors and the SWB such that it is possible to characterise an individual's predisposition to use a particular ATD. Results also show that the scales are predictive of the quality of the ATD and user match at follow-up. Rehabilitation practitioners who use the ATD PA may achieve enhanced assistive technology service delivery outcomes by using this evidence-based measure.

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