[Ohio-talk] Deborah Kendrick Column

[Eric Duffy]

Deborah Kendrick commentary: It's vital to see from perspective of blind.
Sunday January 19, 2014 4:55 AM . Monday we celebrate the life of a man who
helped us, as a nation, take a close look at ourselves and some of our
inhumane behaviors. In celebrating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. s life,
we celebrate ourselves in a way, our ever so progressive acceptance of every
human being on the basis of character and ability. Fifty years after his "I
Have a Dream" speech moved a nation and 45 years after his death, we pat
ourselves on the back at our 21st century brand of tolerance. We give every
individual a fair and equal opportunity. Except when we don't . Sometimes,
discrimination is dressed up in so many layers of confusion that analogies
seem impossible. But if you tell someone they can come in - to your school,
your place of business or your amusement park - and then render acceptance
of that invitation impossible, well, it still looks like discrimination. A
college junior filed suit against Miami University in Oxford this week. She
was accepted - even embraced - and then, her complaint maintains, denied the
opportunity to learn. Hers is a situation that shouldn't be happening in
2014, but here's the story. Aleeha Dudley has been blind since birth. In
preschool, she began learning to read Braille - and took to that reading
like the proverbial duck to water. And, speaking of ducks, they are one of
the few animals Aleeha didn't cuddle and care for in her childhood. She
calmed kittens, cuddled dogs, petted the cattle on her parents' small New
Paris, Ohio, farm, and whispered all her preteen secrets to a horse she
considered her best friend. By the age of 10, Aleeha knew she wanted to be a
veterinarian when she grew up, and there were no serious considerations to
contradict that plan. In 2011, she graduated from high school with a 3.6
grade-point average and scholarships from Miami University, the National
Federation of the Blind and others. The university understood her intended
major of zoology and long-range plan of veterinary school and agreed to
provide her with the auxiliary tools necessary to participate fully in her
courses. A month before her 18 {+t}{+h} birthday, Aleeha Dudley's college
life began, and her future looked dazzling. But how does a blind student
study chemistry, biology, calculus or even Spanish? There have always been
work-arounds, ways to convey visual information with nonvisual techniques,
and in this era of technology, the work-arounds are more readily available
than ever. If a blind student gets textbooks in electronic formats, those
texts can then be read on refreshable Braille displays. If images of cells
and graphs and parts of anatomy are reproduced in appropriate tactile
formats, a blind student can absorb that information as well through the
hands as a sighted student does through the eyes. The key is in providing
these texts and images in appropriate formats and, of course, on the same
schedule that other students receive the information. If the idea of
processing visual information in a nonvisual way is elusive, here's an
analogy: You want desperately to take a class in, say, patio gardening. You
read all about it, but, alas, the course is going to be taught in German,
and you don't speak German. So you talk to the institution of higher
learning, and they say, "No problem. We'll be sure that an English
translation is available. When you get there, there is indeed someone
speaking English, but the phrasing is off, the cadences unfamiliar, the
concepts not in order. When you don't excel in the gardening class, is it
because you don't understand gardening or because you are not adept at
unscrambling word puzzles to put the English you have heard into a sequence
that will convey gardening concepts? Dudley reads Braille and can comprehend
tactile images in a visual way. She says her electronic versions of
textbooks have not been presented in a format that can be easily navigated
and studied and that tactile images, when available, have not been properly
designed or developed on time. In other words, her grades are not reflecting
what she can learn about zoology or chemistry but, rather, how well she can
navigate poorly formatted texts and inadequate materials. Whether Dudley or
Miami University is right will be determined by our legal system. My hope is
that everyone involved in deciding this case is able to speak the same
language. If translation and formatting are absent - if, in other words, all
participants are not able to see how learning occurs from a blind person's
perspective - justice never will be done. Deborah Kendrick is a Cincinnati
writer and advocate for people with disabilities. dkkendrick at earthlink.net