I am very glad you chose to ask this question. Thank you for your openness to feedback. Except for one major thing, my accessibility experience with LI has largely been positive. When I sign in with my username and try to view threads, it doesn't allow me to view them properly or comments in cronological order. When I click on a thread, it takes me to something called "Commentariat". I have to then try and click on multiple unlabelled icons which my screen reader just reads as "button" (rather than telling me what "button" or buttons those are) in order to view comments, which makes the entire thing quite time-consuming. Therefore, I choose to view stuff on LI being signed out. The workaround I have found for commenting is to change the default display username from "Guest" to "Blindlaw2003", as I have done in this example when I am commenting multiple times or responding and wish to be identified as a previous person who commented/the OP, rather than signing in with the account which I actually created, which has an entirely different username.
NB: If in any of the other replies I have given above, if you have received a reply from "Guest", that is likely because I forgot to change the display name from "Guest" to "Blindlaw2003".
I think the following points of broad, general advice should help you to a certain extent (apologies, I know this is a lot to read):
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.
First of all, thank you. Absolutely, LI should really be given credit for publishing this and for asking good questions themselves (and this is before giving them credit for allowing lengthy comments/responses, a lot of the questions here are very thoughtful indeed and deserve good answers).
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.
Thanks! Thats useful. To answer your last question- I think I rely on sight a lot when i footnote or edit- I dont use zotero so I just footnote by sight. Obviously I cannot remember what the citation is so I copy paste and then edit. I would think if I couldnt see- if I had to keep going back and forth in the word doc figuring out what footnote to put where and figuring out what the citation is over and over- I would get pretty exhausted.
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!
I suddenly thought of this question - what could an academic do to make their classes more accessible - and remembered something very important that I forgot to mention earlier. Screen reader software packages can't access materials shown via the screen sharing options available on the typical online meeting platforms (Teams, Zoom, Google Meet...). Therefore, if you are conducting a class online and will be showing any material using screen share, you would be well-advised to send it to a blind student in advance, at least if you'll be starting to teach in the next couple of years (these software packages might develop in the time being, hopefully). Please don't forget this, even if you take away nothing else, it can cause so much headache, both for student and teacher, if you do. Relating this to previous points made about listening to your disabled student and seeing what works for them while also making the most of institutional memory and knowledge, obviously you, as a lawyer (and therefore a non-specialist in assistive technology), don't have capacity to keep up with developments in assistive tech, knowledge which would help you greatly in knowing what is the best way to communicate/work with your blind student. Therefore, keep your communication channels with your student open. In addition to this, consult (where available) your university's assistive technology specialists/disability advisors on best practices in working with assistive technology. If you are at an educational establishment where the institutional knowledge levels on this stuff are low (i.e., the vast, probably the overwhelming, majority of institutions in India at this time), please, for the love of Mike, don't get trapped by this stupid chip-on-the-shoulder that is culturally present in India of being opposed to using the best practices in this regard that have been used overseas. If you want some (mild) directing, the Accessibility and Disability Resource Centre (ADRC) at Cambridge (the admin department there supporting disabled students) and its counterparts at Oxford (the Disability Advisory Service (DAS)) and at Queen Mary University of London (the Disability and Dyslexia Service) have excellent online advice on course materials' accessibility (if I remember rightly, the DWS at LSE has a specific document on its website collating knowledge on accessible document construction).
As the subject indicates, I am a blind person and a law student, in my third year of my undergraduate law degree. Inspired by another LI thread and angered by the amount of ignorance and openly discriminatory assumptions I have faced, I decided to post this thread. Basically, ask any questions you have - any at all - on how I navigate life as a law student while being blind, my aspirations... or any other topic you think might interest you. I promise that, however rediculous or rude the question, I will respond as maturely as I possibly can. Abuse (if published) will, naturally, be ignored. Mods, please moderate comments (even obviously problematic ones) with a light touch, if you can. I'd rather maturely respond to ableist assumptions on my own terms (I chose to open the pandora's box) than have them papered over or covered up. Looking forward to responding to questions (if this is published)!
1. Being given reading materials in an inaccessible format: Universities and their administrations should give better advice to members of academic staff on how to make materials accessible. I often receive PDFs that are scanned/image-based, which must be converted into typed text format, like the text of this comment. It isn’t students’ responsibility to make materials accessible for themselves. While academic freedom must be balanced, there should be stronger rules/frameworks surrounding when materials should be given out to students with support needs, made accessible etc.
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.
Depends, from document to document. I use a screen reader on a computer to read. While I say "depends", go by the following thumb rule: if you, an average sighted person, take 7 minutes to read a document, I would need 10 to 11 minutes. With very large PDFs (a typical book, e.g.), more time needs to be set aside. This is because opening a PDF with a screen reader isn't like opening a book or a PDF for the sighted. The PDF must be prepared (even if set to "Searchable" mode) to "interact" with a screen reader, a process called "tagging". For an 800 page book, this "tagging" itself can take as long as six minutes to complete, only after which can the PDF even be read.
I use a screen reader software both on a laptop and on a smartphone. On the smartphone, as I use an iPhone, I use the built-in screen reader, Voiceover. This reads out everything that's there on the screen to me, including when I type, and when I navigate by swiping my finger.
Not at all 'stupid questions'! The only error I think you have made is that your questions are predicated on the assumption that I have (or have had) to 'adapt' to blindness. While this may be the case for a number of blind or partially sighted people, that isn't so for me. I have been blind since the age of four, so the method of working I have described is my natural way of doing things, just as yours is the natural way for you to do things.
You sound absolutely wonderful and just so nice! This thread is the most wholesome thing I’ve come across all day, thank you for initiating discourse on this topic :)
NB: If in any of the other replies I have given above, if you have received a reply from "Guest", that is likely because I forgot to change the display name from "Guest" to "Blindlaw2003".
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.