 I'm going to hand over in a moment to Donald, who's from the School of Computing at Dublin City University in Ireland, and his presentations. I have a blind student in my math science class. Should I panic, how to promote inclusion for blind students? So, Donald. Good morning. You might notice that I'm not using PowerPoint, and that is a very, very deliberate play, because what I would like you to do for the next 20 minutes or so, is to put yourselves in the position of a blind student at primary, post-primary, or indeed university education, who must sit in a class just as you are doing now, and have nothing to look at. Absolutely, in many cases, nothing. Now, what I would ask you to do is to think about how you would convey, this is a complete turnaround, usually an accessibility, you see. We have a situation where the teacher, the lecturer, the course designer starts with a visual paradigm and says, how do I make this accessible to a blind student? What we're doing today is I'm going to talk to you, and you're going to visualise how you'd make my content accessible to a sighted person. So it's a complete and absolute 180-degree paradigm shift. Ladies and gentlemen, a few facts about blind people. Some of these were given to me by a London cabbie, so they're all very accurate. I was informed once you see that, in fact this was a Dublin cabbie, but never mind. I was informed once you see that a blind person can't live on their own, they can't cook. This was just after this particular taxi driver had picked me up from my apartment. I was also informed that a blind person can't ski. This, by the way, was on the way to the airport where the taxi driver had just put my set of skis in the back of his car, but that's the whole of the story. I was also informed, and this one is accurate, that blind people don't make very good air traffic controllers. That bit is actually true. But the other thing that I hear on a regular basis is, and this is not my London or Dublin cabbie, is that blind people can't do science music, where the music involves reading of music, of course by year is no problem, or anything that's inherently visual. Because you see math, science, geography, economics, all of these disciplines involve diagrammatic or visual presentation of material. And many of you will have to deal with the situation where, or may have had to deal with the situation, where you've got a blind student in your class and all of a sudden you've got to present a molecular structure, a circuit diagram, the long or short run situation under monopoly. And you suddenly are faced with this dilemma of what do I do, how do I cope? Sadly, in 2011, we're still faced with the situation where blind students are given extraordinarily bad career advice. They're told, you can't do this, the technology doesn't exist to actually help you do this. And what I'm hoping by the end of today is that you'll realise that there are still very serious challenges. Facing you as course designers, lecturers, teachers, but more importantly, or equally importantly I should say, facing the students who must also engage and take a lot of responsibility for what they do. Because make no two ways about this, it is very much a two-way street, where the responsibility rests with both the academic institution providing the materials, but equally with the blind student who must engage. I'll tell you a wonderful story about this. We have a situation in Dublin, which I believe to be in Ireland, which to me is crazy, where a blind student walks into a class and has a personal assistant to PA to take their notes for them. Now I personally believe that the blind student should be facilitated with a braille note taker, which many of you may have come across, it's an input device that enables a student to write in braille, it's electronic, or a laptop, or a tape recorder, or something else to take their own notes. Because I don't believe that any personal assistant, we all learn differently. As everybody in this room knows, everybody learns differently. They're learning styles certainly, but everybody learns differently. So how does a personal assistant know what information the person they're taking notes for is going to need to remember or wants to remember? We had a wonderful situation, and it goes back to the whole thing of personal responsibility, where we had to actually clamp down on some of this because what was actually happening was the PA was turning up to the lecturer and the student wasn't, particularly at 9 o'clock in the morning. So we actually had to clamp down. So I go back to my whole role that yes it is your responsibility to provide the material, but it is equally the responsibility of the student to engage and work with you on providing that material, and if you don't get that two way support, you've got a problem right off. But how do we provide material? Well, let's take two very distinct and different styles. I'm going to start with mathematics. Again, let's call a spade a spade here. Every student who has ever done a science degree, unless they absolutely adore the subject. If you've got a student who just goes in to do a science degree, who's interested in chemistry or is interested in computer science, the odds are they will look at a textbook and go, oh, there's an equation, I'm going to skip it. Now that's fine, because the sighted student has the option. In the case of the blind student, in very many cases, you don't have the option. Why? Because unless the student knows Braille, mathematics is extraordinarily difficult. Let me give you an example. This is work that we have been working on for several years. Apple menu. Sound on to my next one. So what you're hearing there is the Apple Mac, which comes with a free screen reader, which is actually very good. And just so you can actually understand what it's saying, I should probably slow it down. 40%, 30%, 25%. That's slowed down by about 30% now, it was at 55%. So I can navigate iTunes, I can navigate, which is relevant, because a lot of material I'm sure you use is on iTunes U, so this is actually worth pointing out. So I'm going to play you a mathematical equation. Sound underline, next two. I want to apologise in advance, the sound quality is not great. I'm not sure it's designed for headphones, and they don't tend to work very well in big auditorium, but it will give you an idea of the kind of access that we're trying to promote for mathematics. X minus one over X plus one minus one equals one over X minus one. Now, three equals 243. Okay, so you had two equations there. First one was a complex fraction. Let's just listen to it again. X minus one over X plus one minus one equals one over X minus one. There is the essential problem. It equals 243. Let's stop talking eventually. There is the essential problem. You've got a visual, a highly visual representation involving fractions, involving lots of things. What's done there is we use two things. We change the, I won't go into the technical details and all this, but we change the cadence of the voice, the rate, the pitch, we introduce pausing, and we add other little extra beeps and so forth to enhance that utterance. Now, as I said, these will be made available after this particular talk. There's no point in doing so before. But what basically you're getting there is an auditory representation of what is a very, very simple equation, extremely simple. It's just a fraction equals another fraction. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem. Because what your blind students have to deal with are cognitive load issues that no sighted student ever has to deal with. A sighted student can look, can gauge exactly what's happening because the mathematics on a page is used as what we would call an external memory. The mathematics forms an external memory, which then aids and assists the student in decomposing, in solving, in understanding the information that's actually provided. Now, consider the disciplines that actually this crops up in. You've got mathematics spanning all kinds of what we call STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics. You've got it in chemistry. You've got it in electronics. You've got it in computing. Economics, mathematics itself, of course. Anything. Biology. So this is a very, very grave problem that researchers, since the first was TV Raman, who's now doing an awful lot of work on Google accessibility, started this off in about 1994. And we've been trying to do it ever since. Now, I'm delighted to say that the results of our work over the last year have been very, very successful, where we're not there yet. But what we've established is that using the extra beeps, the extra timbre and the voice, if you will, that actually helps the student to lessen slightly the cognitive load. What are we missing? We're missing that external memory. We're missing the fact that the sighted student can flick the right back over an equation and see how things relate. We need to put an interface on top of this now, so we figured out how to speak things. We didn't have to say what to speak and to give the student control over that. Because, you see, otherwise, the blind student is at an absolute disadvantage in terms of what they can do cognitively. An awful lot of the mind is given up to actually simulating and actually remembering what the thing is, because speech, you see, is what we call a transitive signal. Once you speak, it's gone. The mathematics on a page acts as a printed memory. It's actually there. So we have to find some way of actually accessing and preserving the structure of the equation and giving the blind student access. This doesn't help you. What do you do? Well, bluntly, you hope your student reads Braille, because Braille acts as an external memory in the same way as the printed page does. Other ways to actually get around this would be to encourage any of your students to learn something like Latte, which, again, provides a version of the material. It's not an optimal solution by any means. Twitch can then be read using a traditional screen reader. A screen reader, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is simply a piece of software. You heard it here. If I go up and down. Sound underline, next one. Sound underline, next two, et cetera. I can go preview, preview. Let's give you some of the information that I received. The 26th of August 2011, dear ALDC participant, thank you for booking to attend ALDC 2011. This document contains joining instruction, et cetera. So, as you can see, the screen reader reads everything that comes up on the screen. It also reads everything that is actually typed in by me, the user. So, it actually acts as a layer between the blind user and whatever device I'm using, whether it's an Apple Mac computer, a PC, an iPhone, an Android device. There are screen readers becoming ubiquitous. Again, that plays as a load on the user because the user actually has to learn that. And they're all keyboard-based, and many of them have hundreds, literally, of keystrokes to achieve tasks that you, as sighted users, can do in a heartbeat. So, that's mathematics. Another fundamental problem we have in science is diagrammatic material. Again, I'd like to talk to you about some of the work that we, one of my, he's just finished, one of my PhD students has just been working on for the past three or four years. The traditional way of embedding images in an accessible way into VLEs, into any website, really, was to use what's called the alt tag. A simple textual description, which, when encountered by a screen reader, gives the blind user access to the same information, or a summary, if you will, of what the purpose of the diagram actually is. That's fine. What if the diagram needs more information? What if, for example, you are using some form of molecular structure, which is a 3D image? What if you're using some kind of a graph? What can you do to convey that information to a blind student who simply cannot see it? Well, the first comment I would make to you is that if you're dealing with 3D images, it is, if you can get hold of the actual object itself, then you give that object to the student. The reason for that, you see, is that sighted people and blind people interact with visual, you can say it in quotes, material in a highly different way. You might think it quite odd that I'm saying a blind person interacts with a visual piece of information, but a blind person can, because technology has evolved to a point where what one can do now is either using specific Braille printers or indeed other technology. You can produce raised images with varying textures of the image. This works fine if it's a 2D image. You can imagine, however, if it's a 3D representation. Imagine, if you will, a wireframe cube. Now, if any of you would like to draw a wireframe cube on your, any of you taking notes or anything like that, what you'll notice is you're actually drawing a representation of a wireframe cube. It's a 3D object drawn in a two-dimensional space, which you look at, and because of perspective, because of the angles, the way the lines are actually drawn, you, as a sighted user, can actually visualise what that object is. That is simply not available to a blind student. What they feel is simply lines going absolutely everywhere, and even though you can see it bears a representation of a wireframe cube, your blind student will simply look at this and go, that's like no cube I've ever seen or felt. So, in that situation, you hand the student a cube. I've seen, for example, for anybody involved in the sciences, chemistry, this kind of thing, I have seen little kits where you can actually make models of molecules and things like that. Use those kind of kits. If you're doing electronics and you're talking about a circuit diagram, build it. Very simply, it doesn't have to be yet, soldered in, but a simple little breadboard and actually build the circuit and let the student trace their finger around. So you can see, for example, that it starts off at the terminal, it goes to a resistor, it then branches, it goes to a capacitor, it goes to so on and so forth, but you actually feel the components and you build up a mental representation of that. That's fine in a classroom situation. What do we do in a situation where VLEs and an awful lot of material is being provided over the internet? And there, we actually do have a problem. And the problem is that all the solutions to date are actually geared around printing images on paper. So while one can actually provide the meta information that's actually required, for example, you can provide, let me backtrack. In some technologies, what you can do is you place a raised image on a large touchscreen, the student can run their fingers over the image, feeling the raised areas. When they press on that raised area, the papers on the touchscreen, they're pressing on the paper, a very simple piece of software takes the point at which they're pressing. That gets relayed back to the computer through a USB cable and a description of that particular area is then spoken of. That kind of software has been around for many, many years. So that is the current state of the art, as you were, of actually presenting tactile information and diagrammatic information to blind students. As I said, that poses a problem when it gets to VLEs and course materials delivered in a situation where the student is not actually present in a physical classroom. Students of mine, Mr Decton McMull, has just completed a PhD investigating how this information could be embedded into Moodle. We have several published papers on this if anybody happens to be interested. What he has done is he has designed an XML-based schema to actually represent all this information, the graphic, the content that actually kind of associates with each region, if you will, of the graphic. He has developed repositories whereby institutions worldwide or institutions can actually add their own images and their own content. But everything is very nicely decoupled. So, for example, let's hypothetically say that there are two diagrams of the human eye in this particular repository. One developed by me in Dublin, one developed by somebody at a university in Germany. And the teacher or course designer looks and says, well, I actually like the one designed in Germany, so I'll use that, so I'll use the image design in Germany, but I'll use the content designed in Dublin. So everything is very, very loosely coupled. This means that they can actually be embedded, as well as having the human eye graphic, for example, embedded in your Moodle page or whatever VLE you choose to use. You can equally then have an accessible version. The only flaw with that is that in advance the various diagrams have to be prepared and printed out on bits of paper and given to the students. So, we're now approaching the end of this, and I go back to my point at the beginning, made at the beginning of this talk. You've heard about diagrams. You've heard me talking about diagrams of the human eye. You've heard me showing, you've heard the examples of mathematical equations that I've played over the audio system in the room. And I would ask you this, could that be made accessible to somebody who can see? And I think the answer is yes. So if my talk without PowerPoint and completely audio-based can be made accessible to somebody who can see, surely the reverse also holds and your talks which are designed and your classes designed for sighted students can be made accessible to blind students. So if you encounter a blind student in your math, science, engineering, economics classes, to quote the great Douglas Adams, don't panic. Thanks very much. Thanks, Donald, for an inspiring talk. Has anyone got any questions that they would like to ask? In my experience working for the JISC Regional Support Centre a few years ago, I did a lot of work with Tectis and I visited a lot of specialist colleges in the London area. I'm really pleased to know how fast the technology has grown. We know it's growing really fast, but how fast it's being adapted and meeting students' needs. So that's what I picked up from... It is growing. It is becoming very fast. We are at a crossroads here because the digital... the evolution of what I will call, not going to call it either, but digital education. Let me just call it that. Provides a wonderful opportunity for blind learners. You've got a situation where materials, standards exist to make materials accessible, not all materials, certainly. Time-dependent media. Video, for example. I noted at the gall dinner last night and through the conference proceedings that many of you are using video. Video presents a very, very interesting challenge because some people will argue quite coherently that the soundtrack of the subtitles to a video that's being used, if, for example, that's going to give you a hypothetical that somebody in here is simply videoing one of their lectures. So you've got the lecturer standing up talking and they're explaining whatever the course content and they've got PowerPoint going on behind. That's fine. Some people argue that that lecturer's spoken utterance actually forms a soundtrack in the backdrop to that video. I don't believe that's actually true. I think that's exactly the same as a blind student sitting in a lecture theatre with a PowerPoint on a board they can't see. So you've got a situation where video and other... I'm going to use what's advised in multimodal content provides very, very interesting challenges. I didn't go into those today. I thought I would confine myself to things that we can actually do something about. But they provide very, very interesting challenges in the years to come, I think. Are there any questions from our live audience in person? Or Matt, is anything coming from the... Someone's typing, clearly, virtually, remotely. There's a question at the back. Can we just wait for the microphone to reach you? Can you tell us who you are as well and where you're from? Hi, Theresa McKinnon from the Language Centre at the University of Warwick. It's less a question than a remark, really. Obviously, we work in languages and it really fascinated me that you slowed down your screen reader so that we could actually listen to it in a way because we're so excited people, we're so dependent on visual, and we tune out our auditory signals. So there's an awful lot that your work is bringing to those of us who are excited to support our learning and I think it's just so exciting to hear and see and inspiring to see and hear what you're doing. Let me give you an example of what it really sounds like. There you go. To be fair, to be honest, if I had a lot of exam papers to read or a lot of projects to correct, that's what I would call standard. If I was actually speed reading, it would sound like this. To do that, you would use headphones. You literally blod out all external signals, all external distractions and you put a very good pair of headphones on and you focus. So that would be literally when I have a lot of projects or a lot of essays and things to correct through quite quickly, I would put on headphones and do that. But comfortable listening will be down around here. That will be very, very comfortable listening. So yes, I did slow it down, as you can say, quite considerably. Oh, we've got a question at the back. Jeremy Benson from the University of Cumbria. Donald, thank you for your talk. A question I've got for you is, do you think it's unavoidable that we require blind or visually impaired students simply to have a better memory? Do you think that there's any way of... No, it is completely. It's very interesting. I was actually just having this conversation this morning. It is the nature of blindness that one relies on memory extensively. You develop tricks, you develop memory models, you develop memory maps subconsciously almost. Depending on how early or how late one has... In my case, I was born blind, so I've never had sight. So I've developed tricks pretty much from the cradle. Now, if you have a situation where somebody loses their sight, either in the teenage years or beyond, those tricks become harder to actually adopt. So what you have is a situation where somebody, in very many cases, somebody is blind or possibly with very, very little residual vision to make them effectively blind. Having to adapt and having to adopt these memory tricks that have not been actually ingrained, that poses a problem. I think you're absolutely correct. If you've got a student who has been blind all the lives, you've got... The tricks are there. If you've got somebody who has lost their sight, it becomes far more problematic, I think. It's really anecdotal evidence. That's just from what I've seen over the years. Thank you. Max, do we have a question from our online audience? This question comes from Michelle Hoyle at the Eampan University. It's quite specific about a tool, so I'm going to read it out exactly as it is, so I don't get it wrong. Michelle says, have you looked at things like make a project with 3D printers and the possibility of integrating XML descriptions that then can be used to drive a 3D printer that a blind student could use to make objects for study in distance or even any education? 3D printers have been looked at, yes. The specification and the system that my PhD student has actually come up with was very much... We tried to future-proof it for exactly this scenario. We don't have a 3D printer at my university, so I have to confess that I have never physically used one. I have looked at them, I've looked at the specifications and everything else. 3D objects can be made, certainly. Models of 3D objects can be made, as I said in my talk. And providing the XML specification to actually drives them could certainly be done. I'm not going to comment over much about them because I quite honestly don't know a huge amount about 3D printing. It's not an area I know, but I don't know what they cost. But in all of these things, and this is a tremendously sad thing, that assistive technology generally across the board. Let me give you an example. It costs a lot of money. Let me give you an example. You can walk into any electronic store in the UK or Ireland and buy a computer for under £400. The screen reader, unless you go with one of the screen ones. If you go for a paid screen reader, hopefully there are no free ones out there. The paid screen reader for that computer costs £700 to £1,000. If you add a braille display to that, you're looking at £5,000 to £6,000. So assistive technology has not come down. So when we're designing these systems, they all look fantastic in theory and they all look wonderful in academic laboratories. We've got to be very cognizant of the fact that the cost has to be kept low. Otherwise people won't adopt them. Thank you. Maybe we can put Michelle and Donald in touch with each other. Can you join me again, thanking Donald very much for a great presentation.