Linguistics Colloquium - Making Ling 101 accessible for blind students

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.