[Athen] Unexpected zoom challenges in my online course (long)

[Hadi Rangin]

Hello Deborah,

Thank you very much for sharing the valuable experience.
One small thing that can help with some of the challenges you mentioned is that you can make the Zoom mute/unmute button a global hotkeys. This will allow you to mute/unmute yourself from any place without switching to the zoom window. Please check the Accessibility settings in zoom.
Alternatively you can use a microphone with a physical and built-in mute/unmute button.

Thanks,
Hadi


From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2020 6:46 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Unexpected zoom challenges in my online course (long)

Note: it's perfectly OK to forward or share this post.

As a screen reader user and full-time DSS staffer, I take courses for personal enrichment and to act as an early warning system around accessibility. I also can better serve my students by describing my own learning adventures but I don't have the anxiety that goes along with needing to pass a class - since I take the courses simply to become better educated.

I've been keeping this list posted about my adventures learning Spanish and I'm now in my third quarter with scores that hover around 90% (though I got 85% on the last quiz!) We are doing the future and subjunctive tenses having already mastered hundreds of vocabulary words and idioms, preterit, imperfect, formal and informal command tenses,  past and present progressive.

I'm encountering some new and unexpected difficulties which I'm sharing to help some of the students you serve.

First, the good things. I wear hearing aids and in previous classes which were held in an acoustically challenging room, whenever we worked in small groups I tended to hear the loudest person in the room rather than the person in my group who was trying to communicate with me but was shyer. That problem thankfully has disappeared. My home office is nice and quiet, and in zoom breakout rooms I don't have to worry about hearing other people who are speaking more loudly. I'm sure some of the students in my previous class thought I had dementia (I'm in my sixties) because as a visually impaired person I didn't know when they were looking at me either! I'd crank up my hearing aids and they'd just amplify everyone in their small groups. So it's been a lot easier to do small group discussions with zoom breakout rooms than in a face-to-face classroom.

Also easier is being able to spread out. I have my computer and mic on one table and my Braille printouts scattered across another large folding table to refer to in class. I can also grab another laptop if I need to look something up. Instead of being confined to a tiny classroom deskI have eight square feet of table real estate to utilize.

The other advantage of having the class online is being able to cut and paste from the chat, so I don't need to worry about what might be getting written on a whiteboard that I'm missing. Especially with a foreign language, seeing how words are spelled is crucial and the instructor types most of these in to the chat while pronouncing them. Having the class recording and the chat available for download is also a terrific study tool.

What's not so fun follows.

Shared screens: they are not accessible and  unless my instructor remembers to tell me ahead of time what she's going to share, I don't have a chance to emboss it or open it in a different window. Half the time I'm scrambling because her teaching style is kind of impromptu and we're always jumping from the textbook to a handout on canvas to another page in the book to a handout she emailed us. I try to keep everything together in a folder and divide that by subfolders for each week but she always surprises me with a handout I forgot to save from an email attachment or a textbook page that wasn't on her weekly calendar. The biggest thing teachers can do to make their course accessible is simply stay organized!

The other problem I have is that darned mute button. I keep myself muted of course, but then she calls on me, and I have to unmute, then alt-tab over to the other window with the exercise we are working on, try not to have the synthesizer yammer too much, while I look at and answer her questions. One small point about screen readers that many forget is that to read something you need it to gain focus. When you switch tasks you often loose focus so if you were looking at line 63 on a web page, when you return you might now be focused on line 24. It's frustrating but only a problem if you have to respond to things real-time.
  And I have to be focused in the zoom window to unmute but I have to be focused in the window with the exercise to actually read it. I don't think instructors understand that print-impaired folk need to be in the window with the text they need to read because everyone else is just looking at the shared screen. Sometimes I wear headphones - gives me a headache with the hearing aids on too, and sometimes I use a second computer but then I forget which keyboard I'm typing on!

A few other difficulties when reading in class; I have a Braille display but it's only 14 characters. (I actualy have a larger display but it's circa 1995 and doesn't work with JAWS and of course I cannot use Canvas on Linux.) So I'm stuck with a 14-character display if I try to read directly from my computer screen. Makes my reading out loud sound like I'm in the first grade. Whereas with a Braille printout I can read out loud normally. I've explained this to instructors by saying it's like reading the screen through a soda straw; maybe folks with small mobile phone screens have similar experiences. My instructor lost power last night and had to grade some assignments with her phone; she told me at last she understood a bit better what using a Braille display must be like.

Many of our exercises have rows of underscores in the middle of sentences to act as fill in blanks. But they are a pain to work with real-time with Braille and probably magnification because you have to skip over them to get to the rest of the sentence. I finally wrote a sophisticated Sed script - Sed is a Linux tool - to zap all the characters that make it harder to read something rapidly in Braille but most students won't have the skill to do this.

And putting something in to Braille isn't like print. You cannot just click the print button. I take a lot of shortcuts, often just setting the translator to Spanish Braille and doing the entire handout in the Spanish code even when parts of it are in English. But still the document needs to be run through a translator. For a low-vision person who would need to reformat a document in large print it is also time-consuming if you are expected to read in class or do an in-class assignment. Aditionally, since Duxbury is copy-protected, and licensed to my work computer in my office, I'm using Braille Blaster and Wintrans which are both free but have various glitches that take extra time. BrailleBlaster for example crashes if there's a form-feed in the file and you enter a page break near it, and some Spanish characters crash BrailleBlaster if they are at the ends of lines. WinTrans doesn't like Spanish either!

Additionally, not all handouts are accessible. This has been a problem as long as I've taken classes. There are wonderful webinars on making your content accessible: use properly formatted tables, lists, headings etc. But if instructors can avoid typing something in to the LMS, they do. They use their phones to take pictures of textbook pages. They assign YouTube videos. They photocopy articles from library books.

In Spanish now we're becoming proficient enough we can analyze "realea" that is text that is intended for native speakers. I don't have the heart to tell my instructor that her carefully cureated set of Spanish junk mail - brochures from State farm and Xfinity, circulars about energy rebates and new car leasing deals - are inaccessible. She scanned them all so carefully to make PDF files. I run them through Kurzweil, and the reading order is a complete mess, not to mention that Spanish words like país are recognized as Pals even though I have the recognition engine set to handle both languages.

I'm a polite and assertive communicator so she's learned to tell me ahead of time - five minutes if I'm lucky - what  page or handout I'll need to have ready, and she's also learned that I should not be the first person she calls on. But still if I were someone who suffered from anxiety I would have dropped the class longago!

I have taken many, many traditional online classes but this is the first time where a class intended to be face-to-face was hurriedly converted to an online format. It's made the class both easier and more challenging in a myriad of ways.  I know some of my less assertive low-vision and LD students are suffering. At least I'm not myself suffering as I take classes mostly for fun. I strongly feel that whatever I can get out of the class is a goodness and that with my skills I don't need to be a perfect success in everything I try to learn.

Unfortunately the young people I serve  are much more attached to their ability to succeed and I hope they will be able to communicate their limitations to their instructors and above all, be heard!

--Debee

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