Linguistic Colloquium: Making Ling 101 accessible for blind students

Making Ling 101 accessible for blind students

Aaron Braver (Texas Tech University)

Linguists have been increasingly aware of the need to make their courses accessible for a wide variety of students—for reasons both practical (e.g., increased enrollments) and principled (e.g., equity).  At the moment, there are not a lot of resources available for Ling 101 instructors, who are sometimes only notified that they have a student with disabilities after the semester has already begun.  In this talk, I describe the process a blind student and I undertook to make course content accessible for blind and low-vision students.  Part of the goal is to provide a set of freely-available resources and techniques that any instructor can implement—many of which will be useful even in classrooms without students with vision loss.
            I describe both successful and unsuccessful attempts to translate visual pedagogical tools to tactile ones, including 3D-printed and laser-etched vocal tract diagrams, ways of representing IPA symbols in Braille, and morphological and syntactic tree diagrams made using a manual Braille typewriter.  I also discuss the ways in which my student’s experiences may differ from those of other blind and visually-impaired students, and how that might impact the tools an instructor decides to deploy in a given course.