Hello,
Unless you still received an A in the class, did you challenge the grade
she gave you since you had proof that her grading of your paper was
inappropriately biased? Most people do not challenge inappropriate
grading, but every university has a policy in place to deal with such.
When it comes to disabilities, the inappropriate grade is most often
given by a teacher who does not believe the student with disabilities
can do the same work, so the instructor grades the paper with more
severity than they grade the rest of the papers. When I worked as a
rehab counselor in a university's disabled students office, we would
have another professor in the same department grade the student's paper
and another paper written for the class. There would be no identifying
information on either paper. If the department colleague gave a better
grade for the disabled student's paper, or if the disabled student's
paper was given a similar grade to the sample paper, we would then take
everything to the department chair, or higher if the department chair
happened to be the instructor who was showing the bias, and the
instructor would then be required to defend their grading. The few times
I did this, the instructors always backed down since we were able to
prove that they were in the wrong, and if they did not admit their
error, the next step would be an instructor's peer review board.
Different universities have different procedures, but they all have
something similar in place.
David Chittenden, MS, CRC, MRCAA
Thomas Ward wrote:
Hi Dark,
Unfortunately, it is pretty much like anything else. It all comes down
to how it is marketed to the masses. Unfortunately, the blind don't
have some central goto source for things like screen readers and
accessible games and they hear about them via word of mouth or through
agencies that have their pet product to give you.
For example, take a game like Termite Torpedo. You and I might agree
it probably isn't the best accessible game ever made, but it happens
to be produced by American Printing House who is well known by state
agencies, schools for the blind, whatever. As a result a while back
when I was talking to BSVI and mentioned that I was working on my own
accessible games the first thing out of their mouth was, you mean a
game like Termite Torpedo?"
The bottom line here is most of those people knew nothing about
Audyssey or most of the games that are out here for the blind. The
only reason they knew about Termite Torpedo is because it happens to
be in their catalogs, and it is made by a well known organization in
the first place. As a result that game, which is so so as far as
accessible games goes, has a chance of reaching a wider audience just
because it is sold by someone of some repute and renown in the blind
community.
The same problem happens to developers of screen readers and other
accessible products. Some companies have an automatic in, and it is
hard to change the system because colleges and government agencies
have been stuck in that mold. They have designed their entire program
around certain products and have no desire to change.
When I was at Wright State they offered a special class for both blind
and sighted students geared toward accessibility software as an
elective. Since I needed the credits and it looked like an easy class
to ace I took it. As it turned out the woman who taught the class
claimed to be an expert on accessibility software for the blind, but
actually was nothing of the sort. As it turned out I knew more than
she did on a variety of topics.
Anyway, that entire class was based on Freedom Scientific products
such as Jaws, Magic, and Openbook. Nothing was said about competing
products like K1000, Window-Eyes, Hal, Zoomtext, or anything else that
should have been mentioned or covered in that class. The final project
for the class was to write a business proposal to be presented to a
company or state agency requesting a computer loaded with accessible
software, and explain why.
Well, for my proposal I set out to write my paper on access software I
happened to use and know well such as Window-Eyes as my screen reader,
Omnipage Pro for OCR, and Zoomtext for screen enlargement. I did so
for two reasons. First, I wanted the instructer to realise there is
software out there besides what she covered in class, and maybe by
reading my paper she might learn something new. Second, I personally
used the software I wrote about, and liked the products better in many
cases than the software that was covered in class. Third, in some
cases like Omnipage Pro was much cheaper than Openbook, worked well
enough for my uses, and I would be saving the agency or company lots
of mony on that sale alone. So you want to know what happened?
Well, the instructer took several points off my grade simply because I
didn't use any of the products covered in class, and it clearly was a
case of I was suppose to parot back everything I heard in class in my
proposal. As that hadn't been specified by the instructer I naturally
took some issue over that, but I honestly don't think she knew how to
grade the ppaper objectively. She admited as much in her office she
wasn't familiar with Omnipage Pro, Window-Eyes, etc so couldn't
evaluate them so knocked points off.
However, I think this proves a very important point about how products
like Jaws gets an almost legendary following in the United States. It
is simply that colleges, state agencies, schools for the blind, and
any other large institution has adopted Jaws early on, and it is
almost impossible to convince them to maybe take a closer look at Hal,
Window-Eyes, or System Access. Even if you can convince someone within
that institution, such as a university, to take a closer look at
alternative products there is no garentee their superiors will agree
to fit the bill for a completely new product. They'd rather stick with
what they have regardless of if it is better or worse than the
alternatives.
dark wrote:
Interesting Tom.
I admit, i know very litle about window eyes at all, ---- in fact I
didn't even know it existed until about 3 years ago. i suspect this
is for the same reason that many people in the Us do not know about Hal.
I wasn't sure about window eyes and games, ---- though as so much
audio games documentation reads "turn off your screen reader" rather
than "turn off Jaws" I'd vaguely assumed that window eyes had the
same trouble.
Nice to know it doesn't, ---- but what you say about freedom
scientific is sad indeed, ---- especially from someone who can phone
up dolphin and get "oh hello, ---- how's your brother?" ---- though i
admit having dealt with dolphin for the past eleven years, ---- and
indeed used dolphin software provided by school for six years before
that, I'm probably in a slightly more unique position than some.
Stil, I'm disturbed that an access tech company could be so irritating.
When I report a bug to dolphin, ---- or ask about Hal's compatibility
with a given program, they're usually good about giving me an answer.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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