Casual Discussion: Science and Math and Accessibility
by Kristen Jones 2 months, 3 weeks agoHey yall. For math and science educators--what resources do you use to make your classes accessible to students who are blind or visually disabled? So much of my science (physics and astronomy) relies on visual representation, whether graphs or diagrams, or outright mathematical equations. What tools do you use to make your work accessible to students who can't access material visually?
Blackboard, the LMS at Central Arizona College, makes us use accessible materials, limiting much of our design capabilities by limiting our tools. I think it's notable that I value checking to see if I have any students with visual disabilities at semester's beginning, including via direct survey, then factor that into my course design.
Yes, Canvas LMS also requires "accessible materials", which means alt text for images and reasonable formatting that can be read by a screen-reader. And yes, visually-impaired students are a rare occurence in college.
However, for me that is beyond the point. I'm more concerned about the field of science and math as a whole, and its approach to teaching that is deeply grounded in, frankly, writing equations on a board and looking at the behavior of data in graphs and charts. I think this TED talk by Dr. Diaz Merced really exemplifies the root of the problem--we are simply not set up to convey information to students without images.
For example, alt-text for image replacement is usually limited to a few sentences (well--it is on Canvas LMS). This means I can't describe the resultant trend in a graph or explain the data being displayed. Is that something that would be of use to someone who can't see, and if so, how much additional verbal description is useful for learning? Are there studies as to which strategies are most effective for students?
Thank you for sharing the interesting TED talk.
BCcampus has a nice Accessibility Toolkit for OER. One of the resources is an accessibility checklist for images, tables, formulas, etc.
Hi Cheryl, thanks for sharing this resource. I am collating tools on 'how to', 'intros'etc, so this will be a welcome addition!
From students I've talked to when I was the Learning Specialist at NAU, one of their favorite resources was just tactile representations and hands-on manipulatable items or other multi-sensory ways to take in information.
Tactile stuff makes a LOT of sense. I am going to go digging to see what physics/astro stuff there is, but do you know if there is any way to like..... 3D print a graph, perhaps?
Yes! I have a 3D printed brain in my office that works like a puzzle and when you take it apart, the pieces are labeled with which area of the brain it is (occipital, frontal, etc) and what the main functions of that area is. 3D printing is so fun! We are supposed to be getting some at AWC for the Maker's Space. Mine recently broke, sadly.
Tactile sounds very cool! I like to have my students do physical representations of graphs when I can (I tell them to show me with their arms) but I'd like to build tactile opportunities as well. One activity I did while teaching surface area was to gather a bunch of different shaped objects (cereal box, soup can, Toblerone package) and have them measure and calculate surface area of those objects so that they could touch and see how the math they were learning applies.
ohh, might be fun for surface area to see how much paper or cloth is needed to wrap a certain shape (sphere, cube, etc).
I encourage my students to use free graphing calculators like Desmos and GeoGebra to graph functions. These tools enable visually impaired students to enlarge the graphs without losing quality.