As you suggest, the adafruit motor shield should fit the arduino stepper library, as it uses a L293D to drive the motor. It can drive 2 stepper with an current of 0.6A (good for most of little stepper you can find in printers, floppy/CD/DVD reader...).

Be careful, they seem to use their own library for this shield, you can find it here :

http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/download.html /https://echat.date

And to know how to connect your stepper, look here :

http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/use.html / https://e-chats.com/omegle