Maximizing iPad Accessibility for Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired: Teaching the Teachers

Chapters:

1. Introduction
2. The iPad and Accessibility
3. Moving Towards a Digital Classroom
4. The Perkins iPad Institute
5. Case Study Comments

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

ED SUMMERS: In the spring of 2012, I was presenting this accessible data visualization technology at a conference, an education conference in North Carolina, and there was someone sitting off to my right during the presentation and she was just pelting me with questions.

At some point during the presentation, somebody else in the room said, "Hey Diane! Quit asking so many questions so somebody else can ask a question." Actually, I think she said, "Hey Diane! Shut up so somebody else can ask a question!" So that was how Diane and I met.

DIANE BRAUNER: Oh, it was eye-opening. It was just absolutely fascinating to see the potential when Ed was showing these different charts and graphs that were on the iPad and they were totally accessible to our students. One of the biggest challenges as our classrooms move into a digital classroom, is what do you do with images for a student that's visually impaired.

Without the technology that SAS uses right now, there isn't anything that we can do other than having a read-aloud; somebody telling you what the image is about. With the types of things that SAS is developing, you can touch; you can interact, you can listen to the part you want to hear; you can go back and listen again.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a black and white chart of the Periodic Table of Elements.

Using the Voice Over application that is built into the Apple iOS operating system, we hear information about each element as it is selected by the user.

BRAUNER: It's completely up to the student to decide what part of the chart they want to look at again or what part of the graph — absolutely fascinating. And to think of how we can apply that into the classroom - it's just wide open right now. Voice Over was there; I played with it a little bit. I did not know about the Bluetooth keyboard commands that we can use to navigate the iPad.

I did not know about the refreshable braille display commands and how to use that. Even now, when you do research on refreshable braille commands, there's information on what the commands are, but not how to apply that command in a classroom setting. So, yeah, it's just wide open.

NARRATOR: In a photograph, we see an example of a refreshable braille display that is connected via Bluetooth to a laptop computer that is also visible in the shot.

Next, we see a close-up of a different refreshable braille display. The cells on this particular machine display 8-dot braille. The plastic dots of the cells can be raised electronically to create readable braille.

SUMMERS: So one of my goals with this professional development program is to help teachers learn how they can teach their students to use the iPad like I use it. I am a successful professional working in the field of technology, and I have peers, just like me, that are using an iPhone and iPad, and other technology — Windows and Mac computers, and we are incredibly proficient in mainstream jobs.

And I feel like there is a big disconnect between the students that are coming out of high school and going to college and the technology that they're using, versus the technology that I use on the job every day. So this professional development program is intended to bring the teachers up to speed so they can close that gap across the board for our students with visual impairments.

CHAPTER 2: The iPad and Accessibility

SUMMERS: There's been a lot of great work making mainstream technology accessible over the last few years — maybe 10 to 20 years. Microsoft has done some really wonderful work in the Windows operating system, which allows third-party developers, like, for instance, the JAWS screen reader; the developers of JAWS can plug into Windows and provide access to visual information.

However, what's different about the iPad and the iPhone is that the screen reader and the magnification, and all the accessibility features are built into the operating system at no additional cost. So every single iPad has the Voice Over screen reader built in, and I can walk up to any of them and enable that feature and then use that device productively.

So, it's a reduced cost for schools, and secondly, students that are using iPads in mainstream classrooms are now the cool kids, as opposed to feeling like dorky kids with this big, bulky, sometimes for the students, embarrassing technology that makes them stand out in their class as being different.

But when the student with the visual impairment is the first student to bring the iPad into the classroom, then they're the cool kid, and that helps a lot, not to mention the fact that it's accessible and you can do productive work on it.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a young girl who is visually impaired learning to use the Voice Over application to access the day's English assignment.

BRAUNER: For our low vision students, in particular, they don't want to look different. They don't want to have the big closed-circuit TV programs where they have to have this big thing that they have to pack up and move from class to class. They have to be in a certain place in the room; they have to able to plug it in. They don't want that.

The iPad is a little personal device right there on their tabletop. They can still connect up to what's going on on the screen. They can see right there, at their lap, they can zoom in on what they want to see and nobody knows it. You know, it's just — iPads are cool. They're fun, they're cool, they're mainstream, and it's not different technology.

It's technology that the teachers understand. Most of our teachers either have an iPhone or an iPad, or have come across that in their daily, personal lives. They understand how it works. When you get into braille notetakers; when you get into other devices, our classroom teachers don't understand that. They don't read braille and they're a little bit fearful of it.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a classroom at Perkins where several students who are blind are practicing their braille notetaker skills.

The notetakers are about the size of a paperback book and have the 8 brailling keys that are used to create the letters and characters of the Braille alphabet.

We then see a tighter shot of a boy who is blind using his notetaker to enter information. He occasionally checks his spelling by using the refreshable braille display built into the notetaker.

BRAUNER: One of the biggest advantages, I think, of the iPad is that we can hand an iPad to a preschooler or a kindergarten student — they can use it instantly. The teacher can walk around the classroom and they say, "Oh, you're writing your words. Oh, Johnny, you misspelt that word," or "Let me type it out for you." And they type it in and the totally blind student can read it on the refreshable braille display, in braille, at the same time; there's that instant interaction.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a very young child, who is blind, using her iPad and a refreshable braille display.

The app on the iPad asks her to identify a particular letter from three choices that appear on the iPad screen.

The girl can use the keys on her refreshable braille display to navigate through the choices. As she navigates, the letter will appear on her refreshable display.

GIRL IN VIDEO: That's the letter K!

VOICE ON IPAD: Hooray!

BRAUNER: The classroom teachers are taking ownership of teaching reading and spelling and language arts and everything else, on the iPad because they understand it and they can see it in print. So no longer are students having to be pulled out of the classroom during the whole language arts period so that they can learn braille, and braille is not fun.

It's pounding away on that old Perkins Braille Writer is hard work, and instead of doing all the songs and the poems and the literacy time that everybody else is doing in that kindergarten classroom during circle time, our kids are being pulled out — "Can you make an A?" A, A, A, A. "Can you make a B?" B, B, B, B. It's not the same and it's not fun.

So that inclusion time that the iPad allows our students to be included in the regular classroom — it's huge.

CHAPTER 3: Moving Towards a Digital Classroom

BRAUNER: Our teachers are hearing that we're moving over to the digital world in the classroom. We're going to all digital textbooks; we're going to online testing — it's all going to be digital. We have classrooms and school districts in North Carolina that have been all digital for five years, so it has happened; it is happening, and this is a sweep across the nation. That's where we're headed.

In the past, our teachers of the visually impaired have been terrified about how is this going to work for somebody that's blind, and specifically the graphics. How do you do the maps and the charts — those kinds of things. But it's been a scary — we know it's coming and until you know how it's going to work, it's a scary time for teachers, and a lot of teachers are really concerned about that. A lot of parents are concerned about that.

What we're doing is we're giving hope. We're showing this is how we can make it successful, and then as they start implementing the iPad in the classroom, all the stories coming back are "My student used to have to have a 1-on-1 to help keep her up in the class. Now she's doing it independently on the iPad. We're hearing lots and lots of stories about that.

We encourage and we train — specifically, intentionally train the teachers to speed the students up. With the Voice Over speech rate, most of our kids start at 25, 30, 35 percent. By the end of the training, we want them up to 100 percent.

SUMMERS: We're in a great position to see some of the challenges that students and teachers are facing as we move into the digital classroom. Some of those challenges are changing the processes that are used in schools to get materials to the student in accessible formats.

There are a lot of existing processes that have been setup over the years that we've been using in schools, and that's going to change. As we move into digital materials, there are a different set of processes that need to be in place, as opposed to, for example, paper braille.

That's going to be a transition, and some other immediate needs that we've seen over the last year and a half, and we've actually started working on them last Fall, is accessible quizzes.

Traditionally, teachers have a folder full of quizzes for the year, paper quizzes, that they would go copy on the copier and hand out that paper version of those quizzes to the mainstream classroom. But as we move forward with technology, we have this wonderful opportunity for all those quizzes to become accessible to every student in the classroom, whether it be a child with a visual impairment or a learning disability.

Or whatever it is, and we actually recognize this is a need and started working with a team of seniors at the computer science school at North Carolina State University on a project to build an accessible quiz facility that mainstream teachers can use to create quizzes on the fly and distribute the quiz digitally to all their students, and the student with an iPad or a laptop that has a visual impairment can complete the quiz in the same way, instead of asking the teacher, just like all the other students.

It's a really neat outcome of this whole professional development program, is finding those most pressing needs and getting some resources applied to those areas. Another place where there's a lot of work going on right now across the publishing industry is those most pressing needs and getting some resources applied to those areas. Another place enhancing our digital publishing formats, such as the 'epub' format, to make them inherently support accessibility for students with all types of disabilities, including visual impairments.

There's a great group working on that at the DAISY Consortium; George Kerscher and some other folks have been — and the International Digital Publishing Forum are the folks who actually publish the 'epub' format. And that new format — it has some wonderful built-in accessible features.

Beyond that, the accessibility of math is a real challenge. There's some great work going on across the industry for supporting ways to encode math so that it can be rendered in ways that work for eyes, ears, and fingers. Apple has introduced some really, really neat initial support for math and making it accessible.

iOS 7 also supports the Nemeth Braille Code, which is how students with visual impairments access math, as well as some really, really neat, interactive low-vision features, as well as integrated real-time translation for audio. So it's a really nice initial support for math, but of course, there's a lot more work that needs to be done.

BRAUNER: One of the advantages of using digital materials for students with visual impairments; when you have paper braille, if you make a mistake, you 'X' it out or you start over again. You put in a clean sheet of paper and you start rewriting the entire report. When you have a digital paper, you just insert it, and now with the technology of the iPad, it's very easy to highlight; it's easy to take notes within a digital textbook. You can highlight pieces and it comes back.

You can, as you take notes, there are little sticky notes in the margin; you can go back to that chapter and check all your notes and it's all written down for you; organized by chapters. It's a great study guide. In some of the textbooks, those notes will instantly be created into flashcards! So you have an instant digital flashcard; all the glossary terms already done for you — it is amazing what you can do now.

When you have a braille textbook, you can't take notes within the textbook. When you have a braille textbook, you can't copy it and paste it someplace else. It's amazing what digital materials can do for our students that we just never dreamed about in the past.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see a young girl who is visually impaired demonstrating her proficiency with the iPad. Her teacher has asked her to locate and open her math textbook, which is stored digitally on her iPad.

TEACHER: What about your math class?

GIRL: It's right here.

TEACHER: Alright. And if you wanted to access it and make it larger, what do you...

GIRL: What would be easier? In this book, you just... [expands screen on iPad with her fingers]

SUMMERS: Digital materials does not mean no braille; it means digital braille rather than paper braille. So if you look at the student who has the 36-volume algebra textbook; that's a lot to put in the backpack. But with an iPad and a refreshable braille display, I can fit 36 textbooks on my iPad, or more — dozens; hundreds perhaps. And they're all accessible with my fingers using braille.

I think the other thing we come back to in the digital classroom — it's a digital workforce out there. We're in the knowledge economy now, and successful employment and contribution out in the world, really, I think, depends on a student's ability to come out and integrate successfully into that mainstream work environment. And in the mainstream work environment, there's no paper braille, I mean, you know, not without having to go off and do that. But being able to access materials digitally using a refreshable braille display and other technologies; that's how students can plug right in quickly and contribute, and not stand out or get left behind.

The world is changing really, really fast and you've got to keep up. A lot of that material is dynamic material. The days of the 'here's the one textbook' and that's it for the whole year; that's over and done with. We're moving through the portal; learning resources that are inside of a — behind a portal more so than a textbook, and that material is changing on a regular basis.

CHAPTER 4: The Perkins iPad Institute

BRAUNER: Well, I think our training is very unique in the fact of our Institute role model, like we've been doing here at Perkins with the Perkins iPad Institute. What we found when we started, we thought, "Oh, we'll do one training. We're good to go; those teachers can run with it no problem."

But what we found was that the teachers would go back to the classroom and then they come across something that would stump them and they didn't know what to do. What makes this training unique, the iPad training unique, is that we take the teachers through the whole process. We teach them about the iPad; we teach them about Voice Over; we teach them about the accessibility features, and then we go on and teach the commands with the Bluetooth keyboard and the refreshable braille display.

We set up a community of practice, which is a Yahoo group list within the teachers, so when they have a question or they find a new app that's really cool, or a technique they want to pass on, they send it out and this Yahoo list goes around to all the teachers and we share information. When you have a student that's tough, you put it out there and ask a question, and somebody has a response. And sometimes it's just a word of encouragement, but that's needed.

With the institutes, we have virtual face-to-face sessions as well. So during that time teachers will write a journal about what their students are doing as they implement the iPad into the classroom. They will take video tapes of their students and they'll send it in and I'll take a look at it, and say, "Oh, here's where you're getting stuck. Let me give you some suggestions." And then we show those in the virtual sessions and say, "Here, look at this neat training technique that this teacher came up with, or look at this app that they're using." And we share that and encourage it.

So it's a semester-long process; it's not a one-time training. We found there's way too much information to do it in a one-time training. So having that ongoing support and encouraging it step-by-step - OK, let's implement it to a classroom. How, specifically, are you going to implement that iPad? Not just teach the commands, but how are you going to make it work within the classroom? That's what the institute is all about.

SUMMERS: The iPad Perkins Institute has consisted of four, full-day, face-to-face workshops, and then in addition to that, there's been three virtual sessions that we've conducted over the phone and WebEx. And these seven sessions have been spread out across the last six months.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see one of the all-day sessions being conducted at Perkins. In addition to learning about accessibility features and practicing how they can be accessed, there is a free exchange of ideas and supports that the institute participants have found to be helpful in their own experience with students.

SUMMERS: The first thing we did is we helped teachers get prepared for implementing the iPad helpful with their students in the classroom, and there's a lot that goes on there because they have to get the IT people involved. They have to get the administration involved. They have to get the general ed. classroom teachers involved to know what to expect as they're bringing this new technology into the classroom for a couple of specific students.

Every participant in the Institute had to select two students that they could use as case studies and they would work with those two students throughout the Institute.

CHAPTER 5: Case Study Comments

BRAUNER: The students in the Perkins iPad Institute have been impacted by this training in a variety of ways. So Helen, who is a VI assistant, a 1-on-1 with a totally blind student, is going to tell us about her student and how this student has gone from needing a lot of assistance, to being independent in the classroom, and she is now using a refreshable braille display.

HELEN: She's become a lot more independent. She doesn't feel as sorry for herself, you know, that she's doing what the other kids are doing. Now she's Facetiming with them, and, you know, she's not being pulled out of the classroom as much. A lot of it's, you know, mainly listening to the teacher, whereas before it was a lot of pull out classes.

The impact on her is her self-esteem, and that she knows that she's — she feels that she able to accomplish anything because she's accomplished working on the iPad. She never thought she would ever work on the iPad, and she told me that, and that means a lot to me. Her reading level has gone up; her — everything, like her speeds have gone up compared to the braille writer.

And I mean, we had the traditional braille writer; we had the Mountbatten, which was an electrical braille writer, and yes; we saw a difference between the traditional and the Mountbatten, but now with the iPad and the Refreshabraille, she punches those emails out, and she, you know...

She's just bounced from — and we only got the Refreshabraille, maybe three weeks ago, and she's running with it. The iPad we've had since September, but even before she got the Refreshabraille, just like — if you see her on the iPad with the rotor and — it truly is amazing. She does her homework on her own now. You know, she doesn't need me anymore.

And, you know, that's my goal for her not to need me.

BRAUNER: So Mary Alice is another VI teacher in the iPad Institute. She has a student that is low-vision who has been very successful in geometry using his iPad.

MARY ALICE: I have to say, in geometry, we're using EduCreations, that app, and it has really helped — it's a whiteboard app, and it's helped the students visualize. The one student said to me that he takes a screenshot of what the teacher is actually doing and he says, "I can actually write what she's writing on my iPad at the same time." And it just gives him such an edge.

NARRATOR: In a video clip, we see Mary Alice's student, who is visually impaired, taking screenshots of his geometry assignment with an app called EduCreations, which allows him to add notes to the shots he has created.

We then see him working on the solution to the assignment. He has mounted his iPad on his desktop monitor, giving himself a more comfortable viewing position, and he is marking and noting the angles as requested by his geometry teacher.

MARY ALICE: Just to give you a timeline, last year my student, not using his iPad; not using attachments, emails, and having the material accessible, he was working at a two week delay. This year he is right on-time with assignments and curriculum.

NARRATOR: For more information about iPads and other accessible technology, visit our Paths to Technology website at www.perkinselearning.org/technology.

We would like thank teachers of the visually impaired: Helen Sofocli & Mary Alice McCraith for their contributions to this webcast.