CLASSROOM EXPERIENCES FOR THE VISUALLY CHALLENGED COMPUTER LITERACY STUDENT

Abstract

Blind or severely visually impaired students facea variety of unique challenges in the course of pursuing theircollege education. While some of these challenges areintrinsic, often a modest adjustment to course content canassist in making material more accessible. This work describesa series of experiences designed to illustrate computingconcepts and applications in a manner accessible to both blindand sighted students in a computer literacy class. Using acombination of custom and publicly available resources, these"hands-on" demonstrations include the tactile exploration ofboth 2D and 3D images and volumes, interaction with small,mobile, robots, and data sonification including the sonificationof visual imagery.Index Terms ⎯ Assistive Technology, Computers in Society,Computer Literacy, General Education, TechnologyEducation