Students highlight simple steps to accessibility
By Stacey Shackford
It doesn’t take much to ensure a class is accessible to all students. In some cases, it’s simply a matter of making class materials available online before class – and uploading fully accessible PDFs or Word documents, formats that screen-reading software can read.
Neurodiversity Working Group
In addition to the physical obstacles some students face are those that are hidden, including neurological disorders that can be just as debilitating.
A new group of faculty and staff have banded together to provide resources for those working with students on the autism spectrum, to ensure an inclusive atmosphere for those students, to raise awareness about autism spectrum disorder and to empower those affected to talk about their needs.
That was the message delivered by a panel of students and staff as part of a Jan. 31 workshop organized by CIT, Facilities Services and Student Disability Services to make Cornell IT professionals aware of some of the issues faced by users with vision, hearing and other disabilities.
Demonstrations were given of assistive technology such as JAWS, which provides auditory feedback to help navigate via keystrokes, and a transcription service called CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), as well as critiques of some of Cornell’s most-used websites.
Simple, well-organized sites with headers or submenus are easiest to navigate using JAWS, explained Mark Colasurdo ’15, a biological engineering student in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He gave class collaboration tool Blackboard high marks; scheduling site Student Center didn’t fare as well.
Colasurdo, whose vision is limited, said he can handle most of his courses without much assistance, but the biggest barrier is poor PDFs, including pages scanned as image files, which are not searchable and have to be converted into Word files.
Colasurdo said he sometimes asks professors to be as verbal as possible during their lectures and explain any graphs or other visuals they may present.
That would also be helpful for Jackie Rachaf ’14, an English and economics student in the College of Arts and Sciences who is bilaterally hard of hearing. She uses a captioning program that produces a live transcript of lectures on her laptop. It can be difficult to keep up with PowerPoints and other visual presentations at the same time, she said. Posting the presentations beforehand would give her a better chance to prepare in advance and review afterward, she said.
Captioning of videos used in class or posted to Cornell websites would also greatly improve access for deaf and hard of hearing students, as well as the general public, who may not understand the speakers or the vocabulary they use, Rachaf said.
Clare van den Blink, director of Academic Technologies, agreed that such accommodations benefit everyone. The former teacher said students with disabilities made her re-assess and change her teaching style. She tended to rely a lot on graphs, for instance, but retrained herself to explain the visuals in great detail. The effort resulted in several students coming up to her after class and thanking her because they hadn’t understood the graphs.
“There were all these unintended benefits. Ultimately, it was a better experience for all of my students,” she said. “Plus, people don’t necessarily self-disclose their conditions, so you may not know the needs of your audience.”
Feb. 12, 2014
Shoals Marine Lab announces new executive director
For wildlife ecologist Jennifer Seavey, the Isles of Shoals archipelago holds appeal beyond its marine environment and population of nesting birds – neighboring Seavey Island was named after her ancestor, William Seavey.
Now the scientist will become a steward of neighboring Appledore Island as director of the Shoals Marine Laboratory beginning April 1.
“I am thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to lead such a successful marine laboratory with a long and unique history,” Seavey said. “I look forward to helping to create and sustain a new vision for Shoals that will bring a variety of new opportunities for current and future students and faculty. It is an exciting time for Shoals.”
Located six miles off the New Hampshire coast in the Gulf of Maine and run by the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and Cornell University in a partnership that has spanned 48 years, the laboratory hosts undergraduate and community educational programs in marine science, sustainable engineering and ornithology.
Seavey will be the first Shoals director to be based at UNH, and she will join the faculty of the UNH School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, where she will lead staff of both campuses. She succeeds Willy Bemis, who retired after nine years as director to return to Cornell’s Ithaca campus as professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
“We are very excited that Jennifer has accepted our offer to become the executive director of the Shoals Marine Lab,” said Larry Mayer, director of UNH’s School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering. “Jennifer brings an ideal combination of academic credibility and relevant marine lab leadership experience. She is full of enthusiasm and new ideas that should assure the long-term success and growth of this crown jewel of marine programs at UNH.”
Seavey is coming to Shoals from the Seahorse Key Marine Laboratory, a field station of the University of Florida where she has served as assistant director, responsible for directing college and K-12 science education programs and overseeing the facilities and staff in support of educational, research and outreach programs.
During her tenure there, she grew the field station’s role to make it a more collaborative and interdisciplinary laboratory and developed new research opportunities, in fields ranging from environmental engineering and experiential art to archaeology and hydrology.
In her new post at Shoals, Seavey hopes to expand the lab’s offerings to include additional course and research opportunities in sustainability engineering, conservation science and coastal community resiliency, as well as partnerships with other educational and research organizations in the region.
“Shoals Marine Lab serves as an invaluable marine research and educational resource for Cornell faculty, student and staff,” said Kathryn J. Boor, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell. “Jennifer’s appointment represents the dawning of a new era in the enduring partnership between CALS and UNH that sustains the lab.”
Seavey’s research focuses on the ecology and conservation of coastal ecosystems. She is particularly interested in understanding human impacts on coastal ecosystems, especially climate change. Her studies have incorporated landscape ecology; shorebirds, small mammal, shellfish, and seabird ecology; barrier island dynamics; and avian habitat selection modeling.
She earned a master’s degree in wildlife sciences at the University of Washington and a doctoral degree in natural resource conservation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She held postdoctoral positions at University of Massachusetts and the University of Florida.
She has worked as a field biologist from coast to coast and internationally. Recently, she served as adjunct faculty at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla.
Stacey Shackford is staff writer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
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