[BlindMath] Advice for blind biomedical engineering student

Fri Jan 21 18:36:45 UTC 2022

Hello Emily.
I appreciate your email and you sharing my frustration.
However, I believe I haven’t expressed myself correctly, for which I apologize.

The Office for Disability is doing 100% of what they can, indeed I have assistants that are helping me on a lot of things for interpretation of the visual content of classes and materials.
I am working closely with them on building the best access as I can.

My main point is that I like being independent and not need to rely on third parties that may take a long time to make the material accessible.
Me trying to convert the material by myself is a combination of tight deadlines, which my research requires ,and the fact that many papers are posted later during the semester.

I have been very successful on my classes so far, in big part due to their help.
However, when you find a paper that you need to read in a couple of days for a class or a research project it is very hard to have anyone doing it for you unless you have a full time transcriber dedicated only for you.
I am just trying to see if that are alternative ways that I could access these kind of material without anyones help.

I understand that the way I wrote seemed that I was much more frustrated, and again I am sorry for that.

Thank you very much.

Kind regards.

Lucas Nadolskis.

> On Jan 21, 2022, at 10:06 AM, Emily Schlenker via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re going to like my advice. The fact is, if a university is large enough to take students, they’re large enough to accommodate all of them with their disability office, and they really need to be taking some more responsibility and relieving you of this burden. what you are going through is 100% unacceptable, and it is not sustainable. At this point, you’re trying to do so many things that are the job of people at your university, that I am not exactly sure where to start to advise you.
> What you most likely will need first and foremost is to meet with the disability office and generate a plan for your accommodations. It is also likely that you will need a sighted assistant to help you with interpreting some of these documents that are not accessible until something else is arranged with braille or screen readable versions.  
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Jan 21, 2022, at 07:46, Lucas Nadolskis via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Jonathan.
>> Hope this email finds you well.
>> 
>> My name is Lucas Nadolskis.
>> I am currently a masters student in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
>> 
>> I have followed some of your emails in BlindMath, and I hope it is okay to send you this private email.
>> 
>> I have studied disciplines related with statistics throughout my life, I got my BS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. And I have always faced the general challenges that a totally blind student has on such classes with professors that had never seen a blind student before.
>> 
>> However, since I started my masters I am having difficulties I din’t have previously. Due to the size of CMU their office for disability is much smaller meaning I am doing much of the adaptations myself.
>> 
>> Those challenges include:
>> Conversion of papers heavily related on math content.
>> Accessing the slides from classes.
>> Reading textbooks.
>> Reading extra papers to facilitate understanding of the subject.
>> 
>> I wonder if you would be able to give me any kind of advice on any of these topics?
>> 
>> Thank you vey much.
>> 
>> Kind regards.
>> 
>> Lucas Nadolskis.
>> 
>> 
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> Good luck.
> Emily
> 
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