[blindkid] Chromebooks

Debby B bwbddl at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 2 17:42:58 UTC 2014


Oh, it is so frustrating! "They" just don't get that our kids get behind
 because "they" don't do their jobs correctly! We had one teacher who criticized Winona for not telling her (the teacher) that the graphs and charts didn't match the printed ones. Really?  Once the teacher figured out what was going on she very kindly volunteered to work extra with Winona to help her understand and catch up. All very nice, but that put Winona behind in other class assignments because she was busy catching up in this class.

What really annoys me is when there is a simple fix, if someone would just think a tiny bit outside the box.

 
Debby
bwbddl at yahoo.com

~"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read."~Mark Twain



On , Debby B <bwbddl at yahoo.com> wrote:
 
Oh, it is so frustrating! "They" just don't get that our kids get behind because "they" don't do their jobs correctly! We had one teacher who critiz


 
Debby
bwbddl at yahoo.com

~"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read."~Mark Twain



On Sunday, March 2, 2014 11:58 AM, Richard Holloway <rholloway at gopbc.org> wrote:
 
Okay, I’m getting a pretty clear picture. This isn’t what I hoped to hear, but it is very much what I anticipated. sounds like we should expect limited accessibility, at best...

Clearly our schools need to stop the piecemeal approach to accessibility matters, but that is easier said than done.

As I mentioned before, our county previously bought some web-based textbooks which have a "self-reading” feature for some of the elementary classes, and these had absolutely no accommodation to access the buttons to play the content (so much sighted assistance was required that it was as simple to just read the content to our daughter directly), nor was there generally any reference to non-text content— not even a mention of many photos, illustrations, charts, and the like, let alone any actual description of the content. No doubt this was not intended to offer access
 for non-visual readers, but was just added to let typically sighted readers have things read to them as a convenience. 

This was yet another-- what was it Albert called it? Another closed reader. I suspect there must have been a way to get a copy of just the text to dump into her braille note from each of the books, though when we managed that with one of her texts last year, it had absolutely no access to page breaks or page numbers, or even chapter breaks, which made using the file pretty close to impossible. The best we could manage was to search for a unique text string. Turns out most of the chapter titles weren’t even unique text so it became an exercise in futility. They basically said here— have your 10-year-old scroll through and manage this 300 or 400 page long continual body of text on an apex and read selected portions of it as assigned… That’s just not a workable solution.

Then again, our battle for managing braille textbooks continues as well. We needed to read homework materials for history this weekend. They sent home three huge volumes of her braille textbook. We understand, there’s just a lot to read, so it takes several volumes. Unfortunately, all three volumes pulled and sent were incorrect. This happens fairly often. They’ll no doubt be willing to give a time extension, but as so often, we’ll be playing catch-up, just like last week they handed her a test to take and she knew NONE of the answers. The reason was they transcribed and presented her with the test for the next upcoming assignment instead of the current one. They were very sorry and they fixed the problem, but the test wasn’t ready until a day or two later, then taking the test late caused her to miss more instruction time. Sort of a perpetual cycle.

I have no doubt electronic text solutions are
 needed for all of our students, but wouldn’t it be nice if there were some actual accessibility standards which were required, enforceable, AND actually ENFORCED which offered full access at least to the text content— never mind trying to manage some sort of description or tactile access to appropriate diagrams and charts. It is really almost laughable how even when there are clear rules of what must happen, there is never, ever any penalty for failing to follow the law.

We also find the tactile charts and exhibits in braille graphics and thermoform are often ill-conceived to the point that content is sometimes hard to grasp even visually due to the similar nature of what references different information, and in these cases it may be indistinguishable by touch. Then there are the times where I have been going over materials with Kendra and asked her to tell me what the chart says in her book, and she asks, “what
 chart?”. This has happened several times— I look in her braille copy to find that and they have two lines drawn, leaving a space for a braille chart, graphic, etc., and there is nothing whatsoever in the space provided. So many things are worked on in little detailed sections by different people, but I guess in the end, often nobody reviews the overall body of work before it reached the end user.

Sorry, I know I’m preaching to the Choir here. It is all just very frustrating.

Again, thanks for all the responses. I’m sure we will figure something out.

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