Close your eyes and try to pour yourself a glass of water. Do you know where to find the pitcher? How will you know when your glass is full? Would you stick your finger inside and wait until you feel the water? How would you brush your teeth blindfolded or clean your house?
These are just a few exercises students do in Northern Illinois University's "Blindness Experience" class to better understand how blind and visually impaired people navigate daily life. NIU is one of only a few universities in the country that offers a class like this.
"The voices of people with lived experiences, that's the focus of this class," said Stacy Kelly, a professor and coordinator of the university's vision studies program.
"What makes it so relevant for people," she said, "is we have a variety of people who have visual impairments themselves, and we're eager to share their stories from all walks of life."
Kelly and fellow professor Sue Dalton interviewed visually impaired people working in careers including broadcasting, film directing and dining, then shared those conversations with students.
Kelly says most students in the class do not know any blind or visually impaired people. Hearing them talk about their experiences is, for lack of a better term, eye-opening.
Take Megan, for example. She is in her 30s, lives independently, has a puppy and enjoys dancing. Like many visually impaired people, she is not completely blind. One of her biggest challenges is what this class seeks to address: Most people do not know how to interact with people with disabilities.
"I'm a person just like you. I have the same emotions just like you. Don't focus on the disability," Megan said. "But I think because they don't come in contact with it much, it's hard for them to accept. They don't want to say the wrong things or do the wrong things, but I think people overthink it and make it awkward for both of us."
There are also more obvious, but important, takeaways for students. If you see a guide dog, leave it alone. If you see a visually impaired person walking down the sidewalk, do not grab them to try to help without asking.
NIU is one of only a handful of universities with a vision studies program, training people to teach blind and visually impaired students. NIU's program has been around for more than 60 years. Kelly says only a fraction of those universities offer a course like this that is open to students from any major.
"Want to be in the area of health care when you graduate from NIU?" Kelly said. "Now you have some ideas if you have a patient or client who's visually impaired, a colleague who's blind. You have some ideas about some very common strategies to support people who are blind or visually impaired."
To reach as many students as possible, the class is online, asynchronous and fulfills a general education requirement. So far, Kelly says it has been successful. Each class has about 250 students. This fall, the course will reach its 1,000th student in the two years it has been offered.
The class has inspired some students to apply for the vision studies program. Traci Carlson is one of them. She starts next year.
"That was one of the first classes I took, the 'Blindness Experience,'" Carlson said. "It just stuck with me. I mean, I could not shake it. I couldn't get it out of my mind."
She says the class changed her life. Carlson knew she wanted to work with people with disabilities, but the course sent her down a new path. She says the firsthand perspectives shared by people with visual impairments stood out the most.
"I really felt like I wanted to be this person," she said. "I want to help show people how they can learn to have confidence in their ability to live their life and navigate getting on a bus, going down the street, going to work."
She started learning braille in the class. Now, she's studying contracted braille, eye anatomy and adaptive technology. Many people do not know smartphones have built-in accessibility software for people with visual impairments.
Kelly says training new vision teachers is crucial because the need is great.
"Most kids who are blind or visually impaired in our country do not have a teacher to teach them," she said. "There has been this severe shortage for teachers of the blind and visually impaired; always has been and, the research also shows, there always will be."
Adults need teachers, too. If someone loses their vision as an adult, who will show them how to travel or check their email?
No matter what career students are pursuing — whether it is related to disabilities or not, and whether they personally know someone who is visually impaired or blind — Carlson says they should take the “Blindness Experience” course.
"If each person that takes this class just gets a little bit of awakening from any of the many resources that are in there," she said, "or just connects a little bit and sees someone simply as a human because of it, then that's a tremendous benefit."
A benefit both for them and the visually impaired people they meet.
Copy Edited by Eryn Lent
