Professors should not be allowed to ban laptops in class. Professors should not be allowed to ban recorders in class. Professors should not be able to ban students from taking pictures of the whiteboard at the end of lectures. Professors should not be allowed to ban ANYTHING that will make the class more accessible for ALL students. I don’t care what the excuse is.
“They might not even be taking notes on their laptop, they’re probably playing games!” So that’s on the student and they’ll have to live with those grades. They’re paying thousands of dollars to be there, if they want to fuck off and waste their money that’s on them.
“I’m uncomfortable with my lectures being recorded!” What EXACTLY are you saying in your lectures that makes you worried about being recorded, hmm?
“I just don’t like the idea of being on camera/recorded at work. How would YOU feel being recorded at work?” Buddy, I work in retail. I’m always being watched. Suck it the fuck up.
And before anyone says “but you can just bypass this by getting permission from accessibility services!” 1. Not all students with disabilities have up-to-date diagnosis to qualify, 2. Not all students with disabilities have had it confirmed by a professional yet and won’t be able to access those services, 3. Not all students who need these accommodations even have a disability! Some people just learn differently and lecture-style learning actually doesn’t work for a lot of people! and 4. This often puts a student on the spot to all their classmates and can make them feel very uncomfortable.
Students should not have to jump through hoops to get an education that they’re paying for. That’s not accessibility.
Students, however, who ARE just playing games on their laptops instead of taking notes, should have the courtesy to NOT SIT ANYWHERE BUT THE BACK ROW.
Because I am HAPPY to make things accessible for you. I will record my own lectures (so the online-only students can listen to the MP3s on their commute, too). The PDFs are on the class website. A copy of the textbook is ON RESERVE at the library, so you can do the readings EVEN WHEN YOUR CAR IS BROKEN INTO. I’ll give your ASL interpreter a copy of the notes so she can sit facing you, and I will harass the publisher until they get off their asses and FedEx a Braille textbook to me to give you.
But everyone else in that class is jumping through hoops, too. And you do NOT get to make it harder for other students to concentrate.
Which those blinking, MOVING games will do. Motion draws the eye.
Why else do you think I roam the classroom while I teach?
It’s not just so I can see IF you’re playing games and NOT sitting in the back.
It’s so I can keeep everyone else’s attention, too.
And rest assured, I will pull out my ‘Captain America is VERY disappointed in you’ face if I roam, and see you gaming (in a front row).
I’ll also happily stand RIGHT NEXT TO YOU until you start making it harder for everyone else to learn.
Game all you want.
Just don’t distract ANYONE ELSE.
Okay, reblogging again for only small thing.
About the professors feeling uncomfortable being recorded. Look. I’m a teacher myself – although I’m not exercising my profession yet – in a country where the fucking PRESIDENT told kids to record their teachers and SEND HIM the videos if they thought it was a SUBVERSIVE CLASS.
Yeah, i agree that you should let people watch your class however is better to them, but if you are in a complicated political climate, record your class yourself. Talk with all your students if possible, try and see who of them would have the class experience improved by it and then give it directly to them.
Praise for accessibility. But do not put yourself in risk.
All very true.
And to add: I’m one of those folks who takes notes better on a laptop. When I took History of Witchcraft (a bomb fucking class, by the way, should be required for women’s studies majors), THE PROF ACTUALLY USED MY NOTES TO HELP COMPOSE THE FINAL.
Why?
Because I can take dictation at 92 WPM unassisted, and with OpenOffice’s autocomplete and a custom complete list, I was able to bump that to 132 WPM.
In other words: she accepted my request to take notes via laptop, and in return she damn near got transcripts of her lessons, color-coded and everything. Which she, in turn, used to assist other students, because sometimes lessons go in directions you didn’t expect because of questions, or because your students may have put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble in their notes and it tells you that you need to clarify your key points.
Accommodating my disability helped THE ENTIRE CLASS. Being open to diverse learning styles created a better class FOR EVERYONE, including the professor.
…..also, she did stop class one time over my laptop. She walked behind me, looked at my screen, and I heard her just….slowly stop…..and then she looked closer over my shoulder, obviously reading the text, and there was this pause, and then she picked back up. I don’t think she believed I could possibly actually be typing that fast until she saw it with her own eyes.
Small tip to help some of your blind friends: do not put 10,000 emojis in the middle of a text or a post if you continue to put text after the emojis because I will tell you that I will Straight give up if I have to listen to “face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy, face with tears of joy,” 23 times just to hear the rest of your text or post.
Oh my god, that’s what screen readers say when they read out emojis?? I didn’t realize.. I will change how I write my posts now… My bad…
This is good to know. Pretend there are twenty three light bulb emojis indicating sudden understanding following this text.
So the clap hands emoji post would be extra annoying since you can’t just speed read it, damn!
YES. That is one of my least favorite emojis because it’s LONG. It also says skin tone on some, and while that’s AWESOME, if you put 30 prayer hands, I have to hear “hands clasped in celebration with medium dark skin tone” 30 times in full. And even if I use a braille display, it still writes it out in full because there’s no real way to represent them any other way yet, so until someone invents a Braille display with like 10 lines that isn’t astronomically expensive, there’s no easy way to skip over them.
Now, at least with some screen readers, punctuation is a little different and if there are multiple of the same thing it’ll say like “17 exclamation points” instead of saying them all individually, and I wish that update would be made to screen readers to speak emojis in multiples that way… That would be a good solution.
Is it okay to use emojis sparingly? I don’t ever use a million like that, the most I’d put in a row is probably two different emojis, lol. But I do feel the need to use either emojis or ASCII faces in order to get emotion across in my writing. Which is better for you, a traditional ASCII face like 🙂 or a newfangled emoji like ☺️? Can your screen reader “translate” things like 🙂 into “smiling face” or do you just hear “colon dash right parentheses”?
Oh yeah, of course! If you only use one or two in a row that’s totally fine! Don’t feel like you have to just stop using them. They are fun and lots of people like them.
As for emoji versus traditional typed out faces, it doesn’t really matter. It can’t translate most of those faces except for a general smiley face, but I know what the symbols put together mean, though this may be difficult for somebody who is not very well versed in print reading. Most blind kids get taught to recognize both though.
There’s so much good info on this post! I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for making it!!
But how do screen readers translate GIFS? Does the OP know that the above post is a gif of a shooting star with the words “the more you know” riding it?
Nope. All I know is that that is an image. Screen readers cannot interpret with the pixels on an image mean. The only reason it can tell me an emoji is because the developers of those emojis programmed them in some way that included alt text, though I cannot tell you how because I am not a programmer or a coder.
Thankfully, somebody noticed the irony in that addition and reblogged it with a description.
the reason that emojis have text associated with them is because emojis were designed not to act as pictures but as a language keyboard and since every one is a pictograph there needs to be a closely associated definition.
that’s also why apple, samsung, or any other company can’t copyright “face with tears of joy” just the art that their operating systems use to express thos pictographs. The art of a set of emojis used by a phone company is essentially a font used for a language.
#NowYouKnow
Also, y’all, in iOS 11, I think somebody somehow saw our nice little thread here and fucking fixed the problem of many emojis because I can remember three (3) distinct times in the past few days that I have come across something like “5 face with tears of joy” and at first been like “what the fuck?? What did that say?“ and then used the rotor to navigate by individual word and character to realize what it was and I was like “OMG!!! My desires have been realized!”
So like I think someone at Apple saw this and answered our prayers guys
That’s actually super interesting to know
Also PDFs that have not been properly converted for accessibility are incredibly frustrating when it comes to screen readers. Nothing like trying to do homework and having the text to speech in the Kindle App say “No text found” 20 times over as it says it once per page.
I actually emailed my one professor I’m having and thanked him for uploading all of his documents onto Blackboard and having them converted into alternative formats (ePub, OCRed PDF (the accessible PDF that screen readers can use and you can highlight and search the text), HTML, Audio, and Electronic Braille.).
