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1. If you work at an institution with reasonably good accessibility infrastructure and a good disability service (I know this sounds largely like an institution in the west at this point, but let's go with it for the sake of argument, as such things should slowly be coming to India, and this point would translate well if you were to work as an academic in the west), follow all reasonable/sensible advice you receive from those in your institutional administration to make your teaching materials accessible. For example, if they tell you that the best accessibility practice would be to upload/assign a PDF as a reading on a Virtual Learning Environment after putting it through SensusAccess or some equivalent accessibility conversion package first that converts image-based PDFs into accessible typed text, it might be better to just do it, rather than see it as “another useless request from the administration”. Remember if you don’t, your student will have to, only increasing the unfair burden on them. At the same time, use your discretion wisely and follow your instincts. Ask yourself, "Is this advice necessarily the best way to do things for a blind person?". This might especially arise if, for example, a document with lots of Mathematical symbols is involved. Therefore, in one sentence, listen to your student, good advice on accessibility practices and your instincts.
2. I think any student with support needs would appreciate if you asked them what they needed in a classroom to better facilitate their learning. Even if you know, just ask, because the answer might be different from blind student to blind student, as not all blind students are the same (one may have a tiny amount of vision where another has none, one might have learned Braille where another hasn’t, one may choose to ask a fellow student to support them by being a notetaker while another might be able to juggle hearing the professor speak while at the same time typing out their notes and listening to the screen reader… you get the point, we aren’t a monolith). But never, ever, ask about or discuss things like accessibility or exam/assessment adjustments in front of other students. You are opening your future blind/disabled student up to potential humiliation and bullying, which you don’t want. In addition, if you are going to do some kind of exercise that may not be the typical back-and-forth of students discussing and answering the teacher’s questions, e.g., getting a student to read something aloud, ask again in advance how your blind student can/will do it. To go with the reading aloud example, some blind people may not find it easy to read aloud, either because they haven’t learned Braille/don’t use it often or find it hard to coordinate between listening to a screen reader, while at the same time reading, which might make them feel embarrassed or humiliated in participating in such an exercise.
3. Learn to be as verbal as you possibly can. Remember, everything you do visually (writing on a board, illustrating how price elasticity of demand works etc.) has to now be described. Get very good at describing in a way which isn’t spoon-feeding. One very embarrassing thing that often happens in classes with blind students is that, when there is a show of hands to answer a question, the teacher says ‘yes’ while looking at/pointing to the blind student. This will leave a blind student confused as to whether you want them to answer or not, leading to awkward pauses. Always say the name, or if you really have trouble remembering names, don’t break these awkward pauses with impatience; remember your student is navigating layers of judgementalism from their fellow sighted course-mates, in a classroom designed for and by sighted people, in conformance with the expectations of a sighted society, in a sighted world.
4. Returning to point 1, it is always good practice to let your student, university library and university disability service (if and where any such thing is available) know of what textbook(s) will be assigned in class in advance. If chapters from multiple books will be assigned, this is also fine, just let all applicable stakeholders know. This gives time for accessible copies of the set text(s) to be procured well in time from publishers if and where available, or scanned by librarians/disability support officers where that is needed.
5. If you are teaching a class on legal research/database usage, learn how databases are perceived by screen reader users. In simpler terms, understand how to navigate legal databases using only keyboard keys/shortcuts, rather than a mouse. Instructions such as “scroll here” or “click on the red arrow” won’t work, with workable alternatives being things like “Scroll using tab/arrow keys [where appropriate]” or “select the ‘advanced search’ option”, because screen readers can’t be used with a mouse meaningfully, and they read out the names of icons/buttons to their users, and do not describe colours/arrows. If you are training your student to use one of the prominent western legal databases (Westlaw, Lexis Nexis etc.), find out if your university/law school can arrange for your blind student to receive training from specialists who work for those databases who know how to train blind people to use them; if your law school hasn’t done such a thing before, get them to do it. Relating to verbalising and descriptions above, remember that stuff their sighted counterparts will take in by looking will often have to be told to a blind person. For example, the convention of underlining case names in the OSCOLA citation style is something the sighted will pick up organically from looking at articles/books’ footnotes/end notes, but something you may have to tell a blind student. Don’t be afraid to mention this as assignment feedback, if necessary. Suppose you are marking a Tort essay that is to be written using OSCOLA and you see that a blind student isn’t underlining case names, something they should have learned about in legal research classes, just give it as feedback, they may not have been told by a careless sighted colleague of yours and may not be told again by colleagues who may take pity or whatever, but instead have such things come back to bite them later.
Second, I am sorry we didn't get to read your (non-abusive, of course) pun! Laughter is always a nice way to smash barriers, of whatever type. Call me ghoulish if you like, but I actually kind of want to read some of those comments marked "trollish" and placed into the "unpublished" pipeline by mods (out of a morbid sense of curiosity just to see how badly those people would have embarrassed themselves if they had been published) :)). Also, I am glad that you seem to have learned/taken away something useful from this yourself.
Maybe its not awkward but it seems it would be time consuming for sure.
With editing as well, yes it does help to hear your work read aloud some times, but more often than not I need to see the different paragraphs and how theyre structured when I edit. I move around sentences a lot and it would be annoying to me if I couldnt see and had to rely on screen reader to know whats going on. Perhaps im not taking into account how well people can adapt.
In any case Im glad you find these tasks to be doable and not too cumbersome. Good Luck to you! and thanks for answering stupid questions!
2. Following from no. 1, better training should be given to academics on how to communicate accessibly (e.g., describing slopes of demand/supply curves in an Economics class).
3. Networking problems: I often find it hard to network on my own in various situations, because the nondisabled feel uncomfortable to come talk to me for various reasons. Law schools can easily solve this problem by introducing a system such as having a blind person be accompanied by a sighted guide in a networking situation who can help them navigate around the room, while at the same time, helping them find and talk to people. There are precedents for this being done, read a book called ‘Haben: The Deafblind Woman who Conquered Harvard Law’, by Haben Girma (the first hearing-impaired and visually impaired person to attend and graduate from Harvard Law School with a J.D.). She describes how the Office of Career Services sent a careers advisor with her into an employer networking event to help out precisely with this.