[nabs-l] Disability Services and Math

[Kaiti Shelton]

Hi all,

This semester I am enrolled in a 200 level stats course necessary for
my major.  Recently I've been having problems with my disability
services and the braille material they have been producing for my math
homework.  The course only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays so the
professor has to move pretty fast through the material.  To try and
help me stay on top of the work as far as getting me the braille to do
it goes the office has a woman who they've hired as the assistive
technology specialist brailling all my math materials with the Tiger
and my professor has given her access to our Sakai sight so she can
just go get the material and not have to wait for me to find what it
is, email it to her, and then have her check her email on a break.
The ideas are great, but the quality of the braille just isn't there.
Sometimes graphs will be missing from questions, the embosser will
mess up several lines of braille and make the question unreadable, or
other times entire questions will be missing from my braille packets.
Contributing to the issue is that with my schedule I'm physically not
able to get to the learning center two days a week due to my classes.
This often means on the days I have stats and the entire morning free
beforehand I often have to go to the ds office only several hours to
pick up materials if they weren't readable the first time and then
hurry to fix my old answers or do them in the first place before the
start of the class.

I feel really frustrated that I have to proofread like this.  Of
course I don't expect everything to be perfect, but at the same time I
don't think I should have to go down to the ds office to tell the
braillist she missed a problem or that I can't read the graph because
she printed it so small that the lines are too close together to read
several times a week.  She is blind herself and a braille reader, so I
wonder why there is no proofreading involved in the process.  And
although I realize that she has other responsibilities, I know I'm the
only student who receives braille material so I don't see how
proofreading a few pages of braille would take much time.  I don't
feel like with all my classes I'm doing that I should also have to
worry if I can even do my homework for them.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to handle this I would appreciate
hearing them.


-- 
Kaiti