[Pibe-division] Fwd: [AERNet] FW: Special Physics software for blind student

[EricGuillory at aol.com]

Often times, it seems there is a paucity of creative and  proactive thought 
when it comes to finding access solutions. I applaud these  efforts and 
hope that work in this regard will continue. I like the fact that  the young 
lady had a ready reply for why she felt compelled to take STEM  courses. All 
too frequently, our students are discouraged from doing so, even if  their 
strength is STEM subject material, as it is felt work in these areas is  too 
difficult or inaccessible.  
EG 



-----Original  Message-----
From: Disabled Student Services in Higher Education  
[mailto:DSSHE-L at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU] On Behalf Of Schnitzer, Anna
Sent:  Tuesday, November 22, 2011 7:26 AM
To:  DSSHE-L at LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU
Subject: Special Physics software for blind  student

How a Professor Gave a Blind Student a New Outlook on Science  November 21, 
2011, 4:51 pm

By Alexandra Rice  <http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/author/arice>

Amanda Lacy  was frustrated with her physics class and ready to drop it.

Ms. Lacy, a  blind student at Austin Community College, is a 
computer-science major who loves  her classes but often struggles in them, not because she 
doesn’t understand the  material, but because she doesn’t have access to 
adequate textbooks. And when  she started taking the introduction-to-physics 
class, things got even worse,  until a professor stepped in with a solution.

The college provides blind  students with digital copies of textbooks so 
they can listen to them on the  computer or read them using an electronic 
Braille display. But the figures and  graphs in Ms. Lacy’s physics book don’t 
easily translate the same way that text  does.

“There are many symbols that the computer doesn’t recognize,” Ms.  Lacy 
said, “so it just comes out as gibberish.” For example, Ms. Lacy said in an  
interview, the computer will read ‘X squared’ simply as ‘X2′.

When Ms.  Lacy showed her digital textbook to her computer-science 
professor, Richard  Baldwin, he was shocked, she said. He told her if someone didn’t 
take her  problem seriously there was no way she would make it through the  
course.

So Mr. Baldwin started working with Ms. Lacy for a few hours each  week, 
slowly going through the textbook and trying to explain the graphics to  her 
in a way that she understood. “He’d do whatever he could to get these  
concepts across,” Ms. Lacy said. “He’d scratch them out on paper, draw them on  
my hand, things like that.” While they were working together, Mr. Baldwin 
began  creating an open-access online tutorial  
<http://cnx.org/content/col11294/latest/>  for blind students  learning physics.

In Mr. Baldwin’s tutorials, equations are written using  only symbols found 
on keyboards so that everything is one-dimensional and  presented in a 
format that blind people can read. Using the tutorials, Ms. Lacy  excelled in 
her physics class and received an A in the course.

Working  with Ms. Lacy taught Mr. Baldwin many things, too, such as that 
blind people  can’t draw with much accuracy.?So he came up with a new software 
for that as  well. “I sent this thing to her at home, and the next time I 
saw her she was  pretty elated,” Mr. Baldwin said. “She told me, ‘Finally, I 
can doodle.’” Before  that, her physics professor would just allow her to 
skip the problems that  required sketches for answers. Now, Ms. Lacy says, 
she is working with the  software so that when she takes Physics II she can 
turn in her completed  homework with the rest of the students.

Sometimes people ask her why she  doesn’t just study something easier for 
blind students, like English or history,  Ms. Lacy says. What does she tell 
them? “Because I’ll get bored.”

This  entry was posted in Computer Science  
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/category/computer-science> ,  Software 
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/category/software> ,  Uncategorized  
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/category/uncategorized> . Bookmark  the permalink  
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/how-a-professor-gave-a-blind-student-a-new-outloo
k-on-science/34424>  .

http://chroni
cle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/how-a-professor-gave-a-blind-student-a-new-outlook-on-science/34424?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Anna  Ercoli Schnitzer
Liaison/Disability Issues Librarian?Taubman Health Sciences  Library 
Coordinator, UM Council for Disability Concerns University of Michigan,  Ann Arbor 
48109 schnitzr at umich.edu

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