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? Stick your finger inside and wait until you feel 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 demystify how blind and visually impaired people live their life. NIU is one of the only 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, 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 story from all walks of life."
Kelly and fellow professor Sue Dalton interviewed visually impaired people in careers from broadcasting, film directing, and dining, and shared those conversations with students.
Kelly says most students in their class don’t know any blind or visually impaired people. So, to hear them talk about their experience is — for lack of a better term — eye-opening.
Take Megan, for example. She’s in her 30s; lives independently. She’s got a puppy and likes to dance. She — like many visually-impaired people — isn’t totally blind. One of her biggest challenges is what this class seeks to solve: most people don’t 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," said Megan. "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 the both of us.”
There are also maybe more obvious, but important, takeaways for students, like, 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 visually impaired and blind students. NIU’s has been around for over 60 years. Kelly says just a fraction of that handful offer a course like this that’s open to students from any major.
“Want to be in the area of healthcare when you graduate from NIU?" said Kelly. "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 get this to as many students as possible, the class is online, asynchronous, and fulfills a general education requirement. So far, so good. Every class has about 250 students. This fall, they’ll have their 1,000th student in the two years it’s been around.
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,' said Carlson. "It just stuck with me. I mean, I could not shake it. I couldn't get it out of my mind."
She says it changed her life. She knew she wanted to work with people with disabilities, but this sent her down a new path. Carlson says it was those first-hand perspectives that stuck out.
“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 diving into contracted braille. She’s studying eye anatomy. It gave her an overview of some adaptive technology too. Many people don’t know smartphones have built-in accessibility software for visually impaired people.
Stacy 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 you lose your vision as an adult, who’s going to show you how to travel or check your email now?
No matter what career students are pursuing, whether it’s related to disabilities or not, whether they personally know anyone visually impaired or blind, Carlson says they should take the "Blindness Experience."
“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.
