[Kansas-blind-students] AIMHE Act Letters -- Let your Voice be Heard!

[Hindley Williams]

Hello All,
I hope you all have had a restful holiday vacation.
Now that the new year has started, I urge you to take action regarding
an issue that is of great concern to us as blind students in higher
education. The AIM HE Act, a piece of proposed legislation, would
require voluntary guidelines to be established for universities to
follow so that students like us can get the access to electronic
instructional materials that we need. Writing a letter about your
experiences with inaccessibility would demonstrate the need for this
act to pass. This is a way for
 us to speak our minds, to have our stories about inaccessibility on
 paper, that will go directly to Congress. This is our opportunity for
 Congress people to read about our struggles in the college classroom,
 and to urge them to support a piece of legislation that will help us
 and others gain equal access to electronic instructional materials.
 Below, you will find three examples of what these letters
 should cover. Please include your own story, and also don't forget to
 describe the Act a bit so that they can understand how it will help
 you.
 I am happy to answer any questions that you may have about the Act
 itself, or how to write one of these letters. I am also happy to help
 you edit, if you'd like. Letters are due to me by January 10. Also,
 don't get caught in TEACH vs. AIM HE; just pick one of the names, and
 NABS will edit it to what it is supposed to be, including if the act
 goes through another name change later down the line. Please consider
 making your voice heard so that we can get the equal access in the
 classroom that we need!
 All Best,
 Hindley
 Sample Letter 1:
 Dear Massachusetts Congressional Delegation:
 When I learned that all of the required readings for the courses in my
 Master of Public Policy program were going to be posted online in
 electronic format, I, as a blind student who cannot read print, was
 thrilled. I assumed that my experience as a graduate student at
 Harvard would be much smoother in terms of accessibility than was my
 time as an undergrad seven years ago at the University of
 Wisconsin-Madison. Unfortunately, my assumption proved premature.
 Despite the ease with which materials can be made accessible with
 current technology, I have found many of my electronic readings to be
 poorly tagged .pdf files that a text to speech screen-reading program
 cannot decipher. Instead of having access equal to that of my peers to
 course readings, the disability student services office has to convert
 the documents into text files and I have to wait to have access to the
 materials. This system is inefficient and it leaves me at a
 disadvantage to my classmates. This is one of many examples of access
 barriers I have encountered due to inaccessible technology. And
 stories like mine are all too common among blind college and graduate
 students. But why are blind students not receiving equal access to all
 aspects of education? It isn’t because accessibility is difficult or
 expensive to achieve. And it isn’t because universities are
 maliciously discriminating against blind students. It is simply
 because schools, for the most part, don’t really understand what
 accessibility looks like. And, therefore, the schools do not know what
 accessibility features to demand from those who create the
 technologies they purchase and use. Voluntary guidelines would address
 this problem. Written standards would set out clear metrics for
 accessibility in course management software, electronic reading
 materials, and e-readers or tablets used by students. These guidelines
 would not impose any new legal requirements on schools, but rather
 would assist schools in meeting their obligation to provide full and
 equal access to all students, regardless of disability. I urge you to
 support equal access to education in order to ensure that blind
 students like me don’t face needless barriers in our education.
 Sincerely,
 Sean Whalen

Sample Letter 2:
TEACH Act Supporting Story

State: Washington
Institution: University of Washington
Name: Cindy Bennett


	My story is one that is immediately successful but painted with
negative undertones. I was a lucky blind student. I learned braille. I
had most of my assignments on time and most of my textbooks on time. I
had a support system of teachers and parents who cared enough to help
me with my work when I did not get my assignments on time. But I hope
this feel-good paragraph comes off as convoluted, because the
accessibility of my primary education should not be a lucky
experience.

However, what started as shortcomings here and there turned into me
questioning my career path after my undergraduate career. My brailled
life story ended at my undergraduate institution. To get my books in
braille, they claimed to need 6 months to contract out the brailling
process since they lacked the equipment, and somehow, professors
seemed to need to use a different book every semester and not know
which book to use until  the week before classes. So along with the
death of braille in my studies, STEM and language pursuits faded. I
switched
from continuing my French studies to Latin, because at least I
wouldn’t have to speak it, and the mistakes in the scanned book could
be more easily deciphered. I didn’t even take my math placement exam,
because it was not accessible, so I was forced to start with college
algebra rather than potentially calculus. Therefore, majors with more
than that as a requirement for me went right out the window because I
could not conceive success without braille or accessible web tools
that described the content.

In college algebra, I had a reader which was fortunately sponsored by
the disabilities office. She was a great reader who spent time with me
to read the inaccessible tests with no descriptions on the graphics. I
had to plan when I would do my homework with her, because the online
homework modules were created in Flash and my screen reader would not
read even the text of the math problems. I had the same reader for
Statistics, and had to dictate the information for her to input into
the statistics software, SPSS, which was on campus desktops with no
screen reading software. The VPN software used for students to obtain
access to campus programs on their laptops was called TealWare and
inaccessible. I could have navigated SPSS with my screen reader if I
would have been able to get to the program on my laptop or if our
campus computers had screen readers built in.

These are just a few examples of how educational shortcomings have
dictated a career path that I second guessed, and took me three years
to redirect. I love psychology and could have been happy in a career,
but the problem is that I did it because it required only
prerequisites that I could scrape by in. if I had been given access to
STEM material earlier, I could already be on my way to a successful
STEM career instead of taking advantage of programs in Information
schools such as Human Centered Design that have begun to accept
applicants with social science backgrounds. I am nervous about
starting graduate school in a field with doubtless more inaccessible
web design tools such as Dreamweaver than accessible ones and in
wedging myself into group projects full of students addicted to Google
Docs (also not very accessible). Standards for accessibility in higher
education are crucial to leveling the playing field. It’s no secret or
surprise that disabled students are grossly underrepresented in STEM.
And this will not change until we can gain the foundations of our
careers of choice in an educational setting that includes them. My
education is dotted with developing patchwork solutions so I could
spend time on earning an education rather than troubleshooting
experience. But when this was impossible, I spent more time on getting
to the assignment than doing the assignment which contributed to
stress and fatigue and a lesser understanding of the content. It
doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read this and know that I did not
receive the education that my degree connotes. I learned a lot of
information and got creative and am a stronger person because of it,
but I also missed out on opportunities that other students had because
I had to preoccupy myself with leveling a playing field that
nondisabled students could run on.


Sample Letter 3:
TEACH Act Supporting Story
State: Pennsylvania
Institution: Villanova University
Name: Hindley Williams

To ensure equal access of instructional materials across disciplines
for students with disabilities, it is critical that colleges and
universities have specific national guidelines by which to abide.  I
had a myriad of careers that I thought about going into as I was
growing up, but never had I foreseen the inaccessibility that would
await me in higher education.  In high school as well as in early
education, I learned how to complete schoolwork through a variety of
mediums, including Braille, screenreading software, and audio books as
resources to aid me in being successful as a blind student.  When I
began college and decided to study English, I did not expect to run
into any accessibility roadblocks, seeing as many books nowadays are
available in accessible electronic formats which I can download to my
refreshable Braille display.  But, throughout my college career, I
have encountered many levels of inaccessibility that have prevented me
from accessing materials as easily as my peers.

The most prevalent issue for me in my education has been inaccessible
PDF files, which are used quite frequently in college.  Since a PDF
file is a picture of a document, my screenreading software recognizes
it as a photograph and is thus unable to decipher the words written on
the page and speak them aloud.  To rectify this, there are several
software programs that aim to extract the text out of the picture so
that it can be read by screenreading software.  However, because PDF
files are often scanned, the scans are not always clear, and thus the
text that is extracted is jumbled, scrambled, and is sometimes
completely unreadable for the screenreader.  On many occasions, I have
found myself emailing my professors, explaining that I was unable to
do the reading for that day's class because of technology
complications.  I have sat in class and taken notes on a class
discussion, feeling disoriented and unable to contribute because I was
not grounded in the context of the reading.  In addition, my research
papers have suffered from this issue.  Since databases are compiled of
a grouping of articles in PDF format, I have often asked my professors
to give me advice on other places where I can find sources that will
be accessible to me.  This greatly limits the materials that I am able
to use when completing assignments, and has caused me to feel less
informed about the topics on which I am writing.

The PDF complications have restricted my ability to participate fully
in my courses, and has shrunk my umbrella of research materials.
These constraints on my education has made going through school more
difficult, adding an extra layer of complexity to the already high
demands of academia.  Having access to these PDF files would ensure
optimum success across fields of study for blind students.  Employing
a set of national guidelines would require colleges and universities
to only distribute instructional materials that are accessible for all
students, including those with disabilities.  I support the TEACH Act,
which legally requires these national voluntary guidelines so as to
ensure accessibility.



-- 
Hindley Williams
hbwilliams16 at gmail.com
(443) 823-0867