Week 4: Visual Impairment

1. Making curriculum and text accessible

The first thing that stood out to me during our class was the diversity of the visual impairments people experience. On https://simulator.seenow.org/ , I was able to see through the lens of people with diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma with an adjustable degree of severity.

This is what it's like to read my class notes with diabetic retinopathy.

I wasn't really aware of how differently impairments affect students and it is always much more powerful to experience them through a simulation than to simply read about them. To make the curriculum and texts accessible to students with visual impairments, it does depend on the individual student's needs but here are a few ideas.

• Digitize the text to align with UDL. Once text is digitized, it is flexible and many aspects can be manipulated to suit the user. Text-to-speech is available, as well as larger font, higher contrast, and many more options.

• Draw the student's visual attention to the image or text through the use of colour, movement, novelty, latency, and light. Essentially, make it exciting to look at the target so students will want to focus on it and learn from it.

• Consider the distance at which the text or images are presented. How far a child can process information is individual, but often closer is better. Consider the student's visual field -- some see better in periphery and the material should be placed off-centre.

• Reduce complexity. Reduce busyness in a text by using solid colour backgrounds, one object to look at at a time, and increasing contrast. Consider the auditory busyness as well. Some students can't look if they are processing a lot of sound.

There are many things to consider when making curriculum more accessible to students with visual impairments which is a good thing! We have more ways to adapt to reduce barriers to individual students and we can find methods which work for them.

2. Top 3 AT devices

We visited abledata.acl.gov to explore the database for assistive technology devices. We were asked to select three that interested us. I was drawn to :

1. Intellikeys is an alternative keyboard which has a variety of keyboard layout options with varying sizes, colours and organizations. This makes the keyboard itself more adaptable to students' needs. You can also make your own overlays for the keyboard specific to the activity you are doing. This would support scaffolding students new to the technology and help reduce over-clicking. I think it could be a friendlier way for many students to use technology than our school Chromebook keyboards which are not intuitive for many students. For students with low vision or visual impairments, it has larger font letters, high contrast, and the keys are well-spaced. It also streamlines the keys so there are fewer of them to look at.

2. Journey Flexi is a desktop video magnifier. Essentially, it is a large monitor which magnifies anything placed beneath it. It offers photo mode and text mode, where brightness and contrast can be modified to student needs. I do think that digitizing texts is the better option for texts as they can be modified digitally, but I thought this was neat as it is highly intuitive and I can imagine that students would be very successful using it independently with paper books of their choice as well. Even better than that, I think the ability to view objects and materials clearly while you're manipulating them would be excellent for science, social studies and art classes. My students are working with soil samples, plants and butterfly chrysalis, and I am envisioning a student with a visual impairment being able to see the soil and its components up close while she is digging at it. I think that could be better than looking at images on a computer screen. In some ways the document cameras we have in the classroom have this ability, but this Journey Flexi is a higher quality version of that.

3. Reizen Braille Watch Again, thinking of my Grade 2/3 context, my students are hyper aware of time. How many minutes do we have left to do our artwork? How many more minutes until recess? I get asked these questions so frequently. The braille watch is a simple thing that makes reading the clock accessible to visually impaired students. It's not going to change the way they read or write, but it is something that matters to students so it matters to me.

3. Adapting story books

We got to adapt a story book for a student with a visual impairment. I thought the experience stories were fantastic. I hadn't heard of that before. Tying student learning to lived experience makes perfect sense. We are always trying to get students to make connections as the brain is made up of connections and linking things together is how we learn. Information linked to other information helps us recall. Tactile elements help students connect their lived experience with the visual and linguistic information in the book. I am sure that would be a very effective way of learning. The multi-sensory books help students engage with the learning and I was thinking how lots of children, not only those with visual impairments, could benefit from the tactile books like the ones described in this video:

Our story book was focused on colours and I got to put many of the considerations listed above to work on our book. It was easier than I thought and I think I could teach other teachers so that's a win!

Another great Saturday.