Meeting #3 with the Insight Group: Notes

Experiences in education

The main theme of this discussion, held on 2^nd August 2020, was to relate and understand personal experiences of Blind and Visually Impaired persons as they navigate through educational systems. Of course this is not exhaustive because of limited time available for the discussion.

Observations/notes:

Access to written materials/books
1. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech were often used by many of the members, and they hardly relied on the Braille system for interfacing with the knowledge sources (books).
2. Audio books, ebooks, etc are available for many subjects. Google search seems to be the tool of choice.
3. However not all physical books are available in audio format. And thus there is often this exclusion of materials.
4. Text book or any physical book readers are accessible in the Pune university, but that is of not much help. Affordability of this technology is a big issue.
5. Some papers are published in ‘protected view’ format that disallows right-clicking, copying, etc for the sake of implementing copyright and IP laws. Such sources are difficult to be accessible.
Exams:
1. In a school or college, responding with audio recordings seems to be an acceptable way of answering exam question.
2. For board exams, scribes were used. Because hand written format is the only accessible one (I guess as of now?).
3. Zainab gave examples of Bhavya Shah who is blind but studied and scored in CBSE class 10 exams.
4. Also of Haroon Kareem, who wrote SSCL paper without using a scribe and using a computer. He got A+.
General schooling:
1. It was interesting to note that not everyone went to a special school with special teachers.
2. Manasvi mentioned that an assistant was relied upon for describing the teacher’s black-board work into words. I wonder if all this had to be remembered on the spot, that it must be difficult to not have notes to refer to for later times?
3. Due to our schooling system focusing on competitiveness, often the much needed mixed schooling experience is not available to the disability facing members. This needs to be explored and researched as to why this is so prevalent and what could be done to solve this.
4. Due to severe paucity of non-visual learning materials, the progress of the disabled community in educational domains is severely compromized. The progress is often delayed by many years as compared to non-disabled people, leading to extended disabilities in future job prospects and so on.
5. The lack of subject choices, due to limitation in mediums, makes one often choose textual intensive subjects such as in the humanities.
6. Academia seems to be valuable choice for people with visual impairments, as it seems to provide a safe environment with more accessibility as compared to other avenues.
Regarding subjects
1. Mathematics
  1. The most difficult of subjects to follow.
  2. Math requires writing symbols, and reading them. It is a highly symbolic language, very abstract. Without a medium, reading, writing and doing math is impossible or at least very hard. Verbal languages can be spoken, but math exists on a symbolic platform.
  3. Manasvi mentioned she had to let go of maths from 5^th standard.
  4. Zainab mentioned that math audio books are available till engineering graduation level.
  5. The overall group’s difficulty with math was pretty obvious.
  6. Neha, who developed visual impairments after completing her education, described that when she didn’t have visual impairments she didn’t quite like math, but now she does and misses doing math because of her visual impairments.
  7. Neha mentioned of someone who was taught math in school using papad!
2. Maps and geography – being a heavily graphical subject, its obvious that it wont have many takers from the B/VI community.
3. Sciences and its labs –
  1. Labs require experiments to be visually conducted, and thus are difficult for BVI students to follow.
  2. Sciences often heavily depend on visual inputs such as color, texture and images to convey their content. Hence these also are difficult to follow.
  3. Can science be done without the visual content? Because a lot of science is non-visual and abstract in nature! However, for the lack of an effective medium (alternatives to images, reading and writing), the content is hard to communicate.
4. Field Visits – these probably bring on significant amount of uncertainties and non-familiarity in the environment and make things uncomfortable as a learning environment.
5. Computer programming – All math done in computers is through simple english alphabets. Does an alphabet friendly math language exist, is it being practiced?
Future
1. According to everyone, tools and options that are currently available for continuing education are hardly known to people and families encountering disabilities for the first time.
2. There seems to be a severe lack of teachers and institutional support system for child education as well as adult education.
3. Doctors and teachers who are usually the first institutional responders to a family facing disability, must be essentially educated to available technologies and possibilities. These people are often the ones who hold much power to guide, help and support people with disabilities ease into the flow of society.
4. A common suggestion from teachers in this group meeting was for developing content considering accessibility as inherently bound to the content. Or in other words – accessibility is designed into the content right from the word go.
5. Vernacular language users often have a hard time because the technologies and books available use english alphabets as their basis.
6. Zainab and Dr. Homiyar mentioned about requirement of a keyboard that can help fast typing and notes taking, but which is small enough to be attached to a smartphone and be carried around without added accommodation. The QWERTY keyboard is great for this, but can this be made fordable and compact? Keys need to be big enough to type easily.
Technological prospects:
1. Can a method be developed where non-visual reading and writing be possible without audio? Audio is great, but often sequential in nature, depends on silent surroundings and is not private. Such method must be able to help take notes, allow going back and forth between the written lines, editing them, scribble some images or shapes and re-read them as need be. It should also be able to convert these notes into audio format and digitize them for future access. It could be a parking space for thoughts, just like images and sketching does for visual thinkers. Can it be done??
2. Some non-visual language needs to exist for easy math work. Can such things as geometry, algebra, etc be done in a non-visual way? Such ways, if they exist are too rare currently and require highly skilled teachers. The latter is difficult if there is no standardized procedure or method.
3. A tactile screen could be desirable that can depict images that can be hand-felt and interpreted non-visually. Our touch faculties are amazing, and currently they are hardly used to compensate for visual shortcomings.
4. Can touch intensive technologies be developed so that people with visual, audio and speech disabilities can access content through them?
5. Smartphones are great, but different apps even if accessible individually, use their own styles of screens and buttons and options. Can a universal accessibility standard be developed for apps so that each app or service is uniform and similar to each other, thus being much easier for B/VI people to follow?

Leave a Reply