[Ohio-talk] Deborah Kendrick Column

[Marianne Denning]

Deborah, you did an excellent job of keeping a balanced approach.  It
is a great article!

On 1/23/14, Eric Duffy <peduffy63 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
Marianne Denning, TVI, MA
Teacher of students who are blind or visually impaired
(513) 607-6053