[Trainer-Talk] Need help with addressing a teacher's concerns with facilitating online language courses for a blind student

[Andy Smith]

Hi,
A few options:
The student can set up BootCamp on the Mac.  If the student doesn't
know how to do this, I'm sure the college IT department can assist
(since it can be somewhat technical).  The other option would be a
Windows virtual machine and VMWare Fusion (my preferred choice,
because you'd have access to both operating systems at the same time).
The disadvantage of this approach is you'd need a lot of processing
power to run both simultaneously.  It's doable, but it can generate a
lot of heat at times.

As for Canvas, I've had pretty good results on my Mac in Chrome.
Writing the Spanish symbols can actually be done relatively easily on
a Mac, but the keyboard commands are a bit strange.  For the vowel
accents, press Option+e, followed by the accented letter.  For
instance, if I want an á, I would press option+e, then a.  For the n
tilde, press option+n, then n again.  As far as I know, VoiceOver on
the Mac does not have automatic language switching, but this might
have changed with the latest update (my Mac is too old to run it).
iOS, however, does have this capability as of the latest update.

I hope this helps your student a little bit.
Cheers and happy new year.

Andy from NJ.

On 1/6/21, Michael Evers via Trainer-Talk <trainer-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> Good afternoon,
>
>
>
>               I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe in the new
> year.  I work for a University as an Assistive Technology Specialist and
> trainer, mostly working with blind and visually impaired students.  This
> afternoon I received an email from a Spanish instructor who brought up some
> concerns they had with how to facilitate teaching an online Spanish course
> to their blind student remotely.  The blind student is a Spanish major and
> they will have to participate in Zoom meetings, read, write and submit
> their
> written assignments and online quizzes through the Canvas Learning
> Management System.  The student will also be receiving written handouts in
> PDF form that they will have to read over and respond to.
>
>               I think that this student may be a Mac user, using Voiceover
> and my experience with the Mac is very limited.  Last semester I also had a
> blind student using a Mac with a similar experience and I was not able to
> properly advise this person on how to troubleshoot their accessibility
> concerns with using Voiceover on the Mac for the same reasons.  They were
> using Safari with Voiceover and they were having problems with getting
> Voiceover to recognize the required form fields and controls in Canvas
> along
> with getting Voiceover to toggle from English to Spanish.  They were also
> having some problems with writing the Spanish accents and symbols and
> applying them to their written assignments.  Since I do not have a Mac, I
> cannot advise them.  I use a Windows computer with JAWS and NVDA.
>
>               Last semester I advised the student to consider using Google
> Chrome on the Mac with Canvas and running Voiceover, because the Canvas
> Management Team here at our college said that Safari is not supported in
> Canvas.  The student said they could get Google Chrome to work better with
> Canvas, but that they could not get Voiceover to automatically switch
> between English and Spanish the way we can with JAWS.  The student still
> has
> trouble with writing the proper Spanish symbols and accents on the Mac and
> of course, I still cannot properly advise this student on how to
> troubleshoot this because I do not have access to a Mac.
>
>               I told the Student that I could only offer assistance with
> trouble-shooting Windows accessibility concerns and that they would be much
> better off investing in a cheep Windows Computer, running NVDA just so they
> could interact with Canvas and more easily read and write in Spanish.  The
> student refused and said they would stick with the Mac.  So, the only
> option
> that I had left was to provide the student with the telephone number to the
> Apple Accessibility Hotline for additional assistance.  That's all I could
> do for them and now I may possibly end up having to do the same thing
> again.
> I am also willing to bet that this student may be the same student who had
> this problem last semester.
>
>               Is there anyone out here on this list who may be able to
> better advise me on how to help this Spanish instructor and their blind
> student?  I want to help them, but I am running out of ideas.  It is my job
> to trouble-shoot accessibility concerns and to also provide students with
> additional training and resources in order for them to be successful.  So
> far, I have been successful with helping my students with everything else
> they have encountered and I want to find a solution to help my student
> solve
> this problem as well.
>
>               I know what it is like to be a blind student who is taking a
> foreign language course.  I took several Spanish courses both in high
> school
> and as an undergraduate in college and did very well.  I read and wrote
> Spanish in Braille and I also read and wrote some Spanish on my Windows PC
> and my iOS Devices, but the Mac is an entirely different animal.  Thank you
> in advance for any help you can offer.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael Evers
>
>  <mailto:Mevers421 at gmail.com> Mevers421 at gmail.com
>
>
>
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