[Ohio-talk] Deborah Kendrick Column

[Deborah Kendrick]

Thanks!


-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio-talk [mailto:ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Marianne
Denning
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 9:53 PM
To: NFB of Ohio Announcement and Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Ohio-talk] Deborah Kendrick Column

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

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