2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering pedagogical content is often highly visual, consisting of formulae and diagrams shown in textbooks taught through lecture slides and writing on whiteboards. Such courses highly dependent on visual content presents a significant access barrier for students who are blind or low vision (BLV), and severely restricts their opportunities to equitably participate and be successful in class. While methods such as creating image descriptions for slides and using tactile graphics have been used in classrooms across other disciplines, they have limited efficacy in STEM classes, and specifically in engineering courses. These methods also have varying efficacy depending on the age at which the student lost vision and their own mental models and exposure to graphics. Additionally, even though the onus for creating their own access should not fall upon BLV students or those with other disabilities, there are very few tools available for BLV students to create their own diagrams or engineering designs in ways that are accessible to them.

In this paper, BLV students and sighted instructors will reflect on the experience of adapting two engineering courses to be more accessible to BLV students. The first course, a Master’s level User-Centered Design (MUCD) course, has traditionally been taught as a visual design class with weekly sketches, graphical depictions of design ideas, and a final project with visual artifacts, rendering it highly inaccessible to BLV students. The second course, a Bachelor’s and Master’s level Ergonomics and Biomechanics (BMEB) course, has many anatomy and physiology diagrams and utilizes complicated models and formulae, and is therefore similarly inaccessible as above.

This paper will present these two courses as case studies, demonstrating the adaptations made while reflecting on what was successful and what was unsuccessful. We will discuss pedagogical content such as tactile anatomy models, clay dough and arts/crafts, stencils and drawing tools, sighted assistance with sketching, screen reader accessible textbooks, and other adaptations utilized. We will provide recommendations for instructors of similar classes who need to adapt their classes.