[Sportsandrec] Health and Fitness or Dietician courses

[Thornbury, Kelly]

You will be hard pressed to find a quality health and fitness or dietician course online, especially an accessible one. A large part of fitness courses are taught "hands on," or in the case of online courses, with lots of video. Also, the texts used generally contain a lot of pictures, and the publishers usually provide, when it is actually available, their books in what they consider to be an "accessible" format, meaning that it is in an electronic version like a PDF without descriptions of the graphics. You'll find very few of your books from a reader source like RFBD because there are so few blind individuals requiring these types of materials, and every school basically has their own versions of materials (I find that most of my instructors have custom books created from several different sources, publishers, and authors, all conveying the information in a way the instructor likes). 
Dietician courses are even worse. There is so much more to becoming a registered dietician than simply knowing the amount of calories in a gram of carbohydrate or the essential macronutrients of the body. To become a registered dietician includes several biology and chemistry classes, including microbiology and organic chemistry just to name a couple. These classes don't lend themselves well to the online format, and if you do find one online, you still have to perform the labs at home. 
Now, being only a few weeks from my B.S. in Kinesiology and Health Promotions, and being completely blind, I will say that it is certainly possible to achieve in an "on campus" environment. It wasn't easy, and I did run into a lot of difficulties with access and accommodations along the way. There just isn't that many blind people pursuing degrees in personal training or health and fitness (not a single staff member in our kinesiology department has ever seen a blind person come through the program, and very few nation wide). . Leading certification organizations also have very little demand from the blind population for accessible formats, but they are getting better. Still, don't expect to simply walk into a certification exam without taking some formal classes in the subject matter first; these exams go way deeper than simply setting up a weight loss program or deciding how many miles someone should run during a week. 
The health and fitness field is still a largely visual field, and be prepared for that. Be prepared to really have to think outside of the box, and come up with adaptations that will not only help you, but will also increase the safety of your clients (if you can't figure out how to monitor someone doing a bench press, or can't manage a group exercise class, you are only putting your clients at greater risk of injury, and lining yourself up for some bad lawsuits). 
I don't want to make it sound like I'm trying to talk anyone out of pursuing their education in health and fitness, because it is one of the best decisions I've ever made, and even if I never train another client, I still have a valuable knowledge base I can apply to my own training and health. Do a lot of research into the school you wish to "attend," ask lots of questions, consider auditing your first couple of classes to get a feel for the staff and the expectations of the instructors, and do your homework before you commit to a particular program.