Over the last several weeks, as part of a research project on braille literacy, I’ve been talking with various people who are visually impaired or completely blind. I’ve learned a great deal about living with a disability, and because many of our conversations have covered classroom experiences, I’ve also learned some things about what it’s like to be a student with a disability.
This is not to say that all disabilities are alike, mind you, or that all people with the same disability experience life in the exact same way. However, I’m pretty sure there are enough common elements to allow us to make a few general observations.
Below, I suggest 5 ways in which we can better meet the needs of our students with disabilities.
1. Try to understand more fully what it’s like to have that particular disability
Specifically, what is it like to be a student with that disability on your campus? Talk with your student(s), talk with your office of disability support services, and talk with your library staff. There are a handful of really simple things to keep in mind.
Get a better understanding of what it takes for your students to get from one classroom to the next. Braille signage is important, for example. (Have someone proofread the braille. Trust me on this one, okay?) Students who use canes, or wheelchairs, or leg braces, or who have asthma might need a little extra time, so be tolerant of chronic tardiness in these situations.
Blind or visually impaired students need access to course texts in a format that will work with a screen reader (software that reads aloud electronic text) or with screen enlargement software. Note that scanned PDF’s will be useless with a screen reader; publishers sometimes provide these PDFs, but if they’re just images (rather than text) there’s no easy way to turn the written words into sound electronically. You should also know that BlackBoard is all but impossible to use for people who access the web with a screen reader. And Flash animations are not recognized by screen reading software, so any publisher sites that have quizzes or other information delivered through Flash aren’t going to be helpful to your blind students.
Deaf students need sign language interpreters, and you’ll need to position yourself so that the interpreter can hear you clearly and (perhaps) so that the deaf student can see your lips move as you speak. If possible, make sure any videos you assign (or show in class) have captions.
Students with mobility issues will often need a special desk or more room around their desk than your other students. Ideally, disability support services will make the necessary adjustments, but in case they don’t you should be aware of these needs.
2. Don’t expect anything less from the students with disabilities
It’s important for us to abandon the idea that students who claim to have a disability (documented or not) are somehow trying to scam us or get by through doing less. Again and again, the people I’ve spoken with about braille literacy have told me how much they’ve disliked being treated as any different than the other students with whom they’ve taken classes. It’s awkward, and it feels patronizing. Instead, they just want an environment that meets their needs as well it meets the needs of other students.
That said, sometimes you’ll be asked to provide students with additional time to complete an assignment. Why? Consider the standard research paper assignment. Your library may or may not be equipped with the assistive technologies that students with disabilities need, which makes using academic databases and other digital resources difficult. For the sighted student, finding and reading an article from JSTOR (to pick one example among many) is not especially time consuming. For the blind or visually imapired student, however, every step takes significantly more time: a PDF image will have to be read aloud and recorded by someone else or else be OCR’ed, then proofread, then converted to synthezized speech by a screen reader.
So recognize that students with disabilities will not necessarily complete the assignments in the exact same way as other students, but they should still be expected to complete the assignments. Anything less is condescending.
3. Think creatively about how best to respond to the students’ needs
Maybe you could come up with assignments that fulfill the same learning outcomes but through different means. Talk with your office of disability support services, your colleagues, and your students to see if they have ideas for alternative assignments. For example, could you partner a sighted student with a blind student to make the research process go more quickly? Could you partner a hearing student with a deaf student and ask them to share their notes from class lectures and discussions?
4. Stop worrying about the “documented” part of the disability
This is the suggestion I’m least confident about because I think you could get into trouble if you take it too far, but here goes. Usually, the campus office of disability support services will require official medical documentation from students who make use of their services. This is good institutional practice, certainly, but it rubs me the wrong way even as I understand the necessity.
Not everyone can afford the kind of medical coverage that will result in an “official” status as disabled through the testing and diagnosis provided by a medical professional. This is especially true when it comes to cognitive disabilities like dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and affective disorders like depression. If we only accommodate the needs of students with “documented” disabilities, then we’re not accommodating the needs of our students from certain socioeconomic background where such documentation is out of reach.
Speaking only for myself, I’d work with any student who came to me, regardless of their “documented” status, and asked to have their needs accommodated within reason. For the most part, I believe, we do this anyway: extending a deadline here, allowing an extra revision there. But I expect all students to tell me up front and at the beginning of class about what kinds of accommodations they need; I am less tolerant of last minute (or after-the-deadline) explanations or requests.
5. In some situations, have fun learning about all the cool gadgets
My research into braille literacy has opened up an entire world of hardware and software I never knew existed, and much of it is pretty darned cool. If asked just to name two, among many, I’d point to the KNFB mobile devices (essentially cellphones that do a great many useful things for blind users) and refreshable braille displays.
In the video below from DingoAcess, Bruce Maguire demonstrates a refreshable braille display and explains why it’s his preferred method for experiencing electronic text.
For a geek like me, this is heaven.
What about you?
How would you rate your campus office of disability support services? Does your library have adequate assistive technology? What suggestions do you have for how to better meet the needs of your students with disabilities?
[Creative Commons licensed image from http://icons.anatom5.de/]
Comments
1. Kaitlin - March 15, 2010 at 11:30 am
These are good points - especially #2. I ran into an interesting issue once with a student in my public speaking class who had Aspberger's. I talked to him and to some of his tutors to understand how I could best help him in the classroom. There was only one point on which we disagreed slightly - how to have him give an impromptu speech. The tutor suggested that I give him some topics in advance, but I felt like this defeated the purpose of the assignment and would give him an unfair advantage. In the end, he completed the assignment the same way as everyone else, and did a great job.
2. Knitting Clio - March 15, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Great post, and I'm glad you included the material under #4. I too am irritated by the institutional practices in our disability office. It's really daunting for new students who have a hard enough time adjusting to college let alone trying to negotiate the hassles of providing documentation (and you're right, health insurance or lack thereof is a hurdle). Even when students have a documented disability it can take awhile for the reasonable accommodations to become available - e.g. a few years ago I had a first-year student with a hearing impairment who had to wait several weeks for the office to get her an fm receiver. Oh yeah, and when the elevator in our building breaks (not infrequently) that means students and faculty with mobility problems can't get to class.
3. joanna - March 15, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Thanks for writing this, George. Have you heard about Browse Aloud? I'm not certain if, a: I've mentioned it before, and b: it reads PDF's.
4. George H. Williams - March 16, 2010 at 10:08 am
You make a good point: Kaitlin. The accommodations are created using input from both parties, the instructor and the student. Unless both parties have input (and are reasonably satisfied) I don't think the process should be considered a success.
5. George H. Williams - March 16, 2010 at 10:10 am
It's certainly unhelpful if the necessary staff or equipment is not available. I've had the good fortune to work at places where I have not run into these problems.
6. George H. Williams - March 16, 2010 at 10:15 am
Thanks! I think I've heard of Browse Aloud, but I'm not sure. In any case, thanks for the heads-up!
Regarding PDFs, it's important to note that there are 2 kinds of article PDFs:
1. PDFs that are just images. Old print articles get scanned and made available online as images. A computer cannot parse that PDF as language without going through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. I'm pretty sure the vast majority of articles on JSTOR fit this category. (Note: I'm not talking about whether or not the JSTOR server has some rough OCR underneath the PDF that allows for full-text searching of their database; I'm talking about what you end up with on your hard drive when you download an article.)
2. PDFs that are text. More recent articles (e.g. those on ProjectMUSE) are transformed from one electronic textual format (perhaps Microsoft Word) into another electronic textual format (a PDF). A computer can parse that PDF as language just as easily as it can a web page or a MS Word document.
So even if a screenreader is advertised as "reading PDFs," remember that this doesn't mean it can read JSTOR PDFS. (...unless that software is much, much more powerful than I realize!)7. Evan Johnston - March 16, 2010 at 04:44 pm
I know I'm a little late to this discussion, but I just wanted to share my experience as a learning disabled student.
In my case, it's always been far easier to deal with professors who are willing to work to provide me with accommodations directly rather than going through our university's disability services center. Removing the extra layer of bureaucracy really does make things easier for all of us in the end. Sometimes that's just not going to be possible, and other times it presents an unreasonable demand on your time (if the student receives 200% time on exams, EG), but in many cases the extra paperwork and coordination with the accommodated testing facility can offset the limited time and effort in giving a student an additional 25 minutes on a 50 minute exam.
That said, it can be a challenge to figure out how to adapt tasks that test the student specifically on the functions for which they receive accommodations. As demonstrated in Kaitlyn's example, many learning disability specialists (in my experience) default to just giving the student extra time, which frequently damages the integrity of the assignment. Keep in mind that you know what you're trying to assess better than anyone else, and that may put you in the best position to design specialized assessments.
One last thought: If you do have students taking their exams at the disability services center (or equivalent), trust the staff to proctor the exams effectively. Typically, such facilities have surveillance cameras and individual timers for each student, so exam integrity is probably better than anything you could offer without an army of TAs.
8. Mitch - March 16, 2010 at 11:06 pm
Let me refer everyone interested in this to the SciTrainU project at Georgia Tech. The focus is on STEM classes, but a lot of what's being investigated translates across the curriculum. The general idea is to get faculty members to incorporate strategies that help students with disabilities but will help all students. For instance, some classes are experimenting with group notetaking. Others are using forums in our LMS with designated online discussion groups. These are all generally easy changes to make, but they can have a profound impact on student learning overall but specifically for students with disabilities (diagnosed and undiagnosed).
9. Krista - March 21, 2010 at 11:52 am
Great suggestions! I'd add that it's also helpful to recognize that not all deaf people sign. (I'm severely/profoundly deaf and never learned to, since I was heavily mainstreamed as a child.) For me, it's best if the instructor remembers to speak clearly, reminds other students to do so during discussions/Q&As, and remembers to turn on close captioning when using video. My new department has sprung for live-captioning during public lectures in our large lecture hall, and several colleagues with full hearing have commented that this is useful for them as well.
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