Happy Friday! This evening we watched an ALT 2021 session entitled “The unexpected transition to online teaching for a vision impaired lecturer: Overcoming accessibility issues during the pandemic” presented by Vanessa Mar-Molinero and Karla De Lima Guedes. De Lima Guedes spoke about working with an instructor with visual impairment and cited data that there are 14.1 million disabled people in the UK with 2 million reporting some form of sight loss and 245 higher education staff disclosing visual impairment. De Lima Guedes spoke about new guidelines and improvements for institutional staff and students, however, there are still gaps in support for instructors. The instructor has cone dystrophy that can cause “a variety of symptoms including decreased visual clarity…” citing data from NORD. The instructor also has nystagmus and has worked at the institution for over forty years. The instructor shared some challenges and strategies used to continue teaching online this year. De Lima Guedes shared the following lessons:
- Ask, don’t assume and offer support
- Line managers awareness
- Give options – allow felxibility
- Stress can get in the way
- Develop a personal relationship
- Use channels that work better for the individual
In a video of the instructor, they shared that “Everyone has needs” which aligns with the NIST FALCoN talk we attended several weeks ago with Dr. Daniel Reinholtz about frequent access check-ins. The last video of the instructor shared by De Lima Guedes from the instructor emphasized that digital learning is currently very visual and that it shouldn’t be that difficult to increase contrast, font size, and have text-to-speech capabilities. The instructor spoke about being willing to learn with some support. They also emphasized that there are advantages of working online as a visually impaired instructor. That was a thought-provoking statement from the instructor. Most online education tools are visual, though what is holding us back from exploring the use of more audio and text options? Today Dr. Phil Gibson spoke to the FALCoN group about using podcasts, for example. I am currently thinking about a better way of emphasizing audio and annotation in the upcoming metagenomics course and… won’t have to record as many videos.
