As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.
As a university professor, I admit with some shame that accessibility issues for specific problem types is not on my radar. “Innovation” isn’t the main culprit here.
Fortunately, my university has a good accessibility center that takes care of accommodation issues (large print versions of tests, etc.). I just send them my tests and they take care of it. It’s a great service, and absolutely crucial because I simply don’t have the time to customize assessments. I assume they would get in touch if they were unable to retrofit accessibility onto an assessment, but that hasn’t happened in my fifteen years of employment.
> It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok.
While there are possibly noble goals behind your suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. I’ll leave to your imagination how much work is often put into supporting these “other” assignments and how up-to-date they’re kept va the mainstream.
> Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.
If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part of the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels like too much work, I’d encourage you to explore why it feels that way, what emotions is this bringing up internally?
Yes. But there will always be an obscure case you can’t cover. Let’s say a test is written. Someone can’t write, but can dictate answers. Is it still the same test or not?
On the other hand, how far can society tip-tap around such alternative takes? Could he go study in a field where hand writing is expected and society would still be forced to adapt?
The commenter (rightly or wrongly) is -I think- suggesting that assignments etc should be from the outset be designed to be accessible in their original form for everyone, and not just "okay, this works for 90% of people, lets worry about the rest separately".
An example I have personally is when designing board games I now have internalised to never just use colour to communicate anything. Never solid colour which can be difficult to determine by the colour-blind, but different colours have different stripes or patterns embedded in them. So if you can't see the colour, you can recognise the stripe spacing, if you can't see the stripe spacing due to low visual-acuity, you can see the colour... and ideally different textures for the blind. (not pratical as it would wear off in the shuffling, but the idea is there).
But an assigment cannot be accessible to everyone by definition. You can't have a vision-based test accessible to a blind person as you can't have a sound-based test accessible to a deaf person.
So I'm not a disability advocate, but I did date someone who was so I was immersed in it, but never having studied it so take my answer as a best effort trying to piece together from memories.
I think the answer would be to make assignments multi-faceted that can be approached differently. Like instead of having students write a report on book they read, which priveledges the those with sight, non-dyselxics, and those that can type let them perhaps record a podcast, film a YouTube video, draw a webcomic etc that lets students show what they know. And then reflect on why does it have to be a book that's read? It could be a film, a mini-series, a radio-play, a graphic novel, a play. That allows people to approach it using their abilities instead of being hampered by disabilities such as blindness, deafness, ADHD, dyslexia, being non-verbal, etc.
It means you've distilled the assignment to it's core: can you summarise the plot, identify key moments, recognise themes and metaphors, and place the work within the historical context in which it was produced.
There you have an assignment that is much more accessible.
The tricky part is that marking them objectively is much more difficult because the criteria of evaluation are not necessarily monolithic but need to take into account the student and the mediums chosen.
It's still separate assignments. The only difference is wether you throw them into a single meta-assignment. Or a separate one with main + fallbacks.
The problem with such assignment is it's very hard to balance the alternatives to be equal. Reading a book takes quite a bit longer than watching a film or even mini-series. IMO it's perfectly fine for someone blind to watch a film and then make a report on it. But how many healthy people would just go for a film since it's quicker? And reading a book is quite a bit different experience than a film due to much more space for imagination and interpretation in a book.
P.S. calling people with no disabilities „privileged“ is just... wrong. It's not a privilege to have a set of eyes/hands/etc.
> If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part of the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels like too much work, I’d encourage you to explore why it feels that way, what emotions is this bringing up internally?
How am I part of the problem? Do you mean I should make a fuss if I get limited options? Or have emotions towards what... My genetical makeup? All in all, I've zero emotions about my lactose intolerance. Being mindful about what I eat is just natural for me. Just like for other people with food allergies/intolerances.
> in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately
Is your goal to get everyone down to the same level by removing all learning material that may be inaccessible to somebody?
Should people just stop consuming anything with lactose to make it more universal for people like me? But then a friend of mine will ask to stop eating fish. Someone else will take away chocolate. At the end of the day all of us will be much worse off.
Yes, it's true that the one example I presented from a quiz game I played at a conference 10+ years ago was not accessible to some people. If I could remember the other questions they used in that quiz I would share them here, but that's the only one that stuck in my brain.
I think you're right to complain about the design of the question. It used Google's disadvantage in that it couldn't process visual information to add difficulty to the task.
However I'm pretty sure there's many of these challenges in an average stem subject. An example would be information dense diagrams which describe some chemical process.
I'm genuinely curious to understand how someone manages to understand these without sight. On my side, I can barely visualize so it was always extremely hard to decipher them and even worse remember them.
Maybe they could 3d print the outline to make it more accessible? Or perhaps the goal is to use the image file with the outline to find the island, something that could/should be achieved via code?
I wouldn't be surprised if a novel solution to the problem emerged from students with diverse abilities. I don't think that brute forcing the problem by comparing the image of every island on the planet vs the outline visually is the best path forward. Its probably something like, create a ratio of the size of each of the bays and then probe for values that fit those quantities on wikipedia.
The good news is that avoiding text-based assignments isn't likely to last. Multimodal agents should be more than capable of identifying islands by shape, or will be soon.
As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.