Accommodating whiteboard glare for low-vision student

Question

A reduced-vision friend faces challenges with whiteboard glare in a new classroom. To further complicate the matter, the teacher uses only colored markers, typically blue, green, or red, which makes the text even harder to discern. The teacher says she cannot do anything, as the glare is caused by the room lighting and windows. Could you suggest what we can do about it?

I list the potential solutions I already identified:

• My friend uses a cell phone camera to capture the material and reads it at home. Yet the use of cell phones and cameras is prohibited by the organization, and attitudes toward cell phones in class are worsening in the country and worldwide. I am not sure if she has received official permission from the teacher, but this seems like a temporary and sub-optimal solution.
• Buying the teacher a big, thick black marker. Some teachers and disadvantaged students find purple work better, could be a good option too. I am considering a few brands, perhaps Asian Artline. Yet perhaps any above-average brand could be just good enough.
• Special translucent films for windows, light sources filters, sprays work great, yet I'm not sure if the teacher and administration would agree to that or how long it would take if they will.
• My friend tried to find a better seat in the classroom, yet they turned out to be about the same or worse either due to glare or other reasons.

Answer 1

Ethically, the teacher must make an accommodation, independent of any laws that might apply. It is unethical to disadvantage a student because she "likes" to use difficult to read markers or there is a "policy" forbidding cameras.

If the students can't convince her to behave ethically, hopefully the department head/chair or the dean can.

To make it clearer, I hope, the OP here can join with their friend in asking the teacher to make it work. Failing that, they can complain to the department or the dean either on their own, with the student at risk, or with a group of classmates. Only the student can request accommodation from an office designed for such but that is likely to take time and effort that should not be needed. The teacher has an ethical responsibility to make learning available to every student. Likewise does the university. Make them understand their responsibility if they don't already.

The university accepted this student and allows them to take this class. The university has a responsibility to allow the student to be as successful as anyone else on a "level playing field". Simple.

The disadvantaged student can request the accommodation in various ways, from the teacher, the department, an office that manages policy, etc. But I have little respect for a teacher who won't make it work with a simple ask. And if they resist, I'd complain to the department even if I wasn't that student.

Answer 2

First of all, any action involving the university or professor needs to be initiated by your friend, who is the student. There is no role for a student's friend in getting accommodations, except perhaps in moral and research support. It may be unfair to place the burden on a disabled person, but that's the way the system works.

You make a couple of suggestions for your friend, which I'll respond to.

1. Take photos surreptitiously. Please don't do this, some people are uncomfortable being photographed; and this is a sub-optimal way of consuming a class. We can do better. However, your friend might ask for an exemption to the policy, explaining their disability.
2. Modify the classroom windows/lights. I am doubtful a university can move fast enough to do that this semester.
3. Sit somewhere else. You mention your friend tried this, and none of the seats are any better.
4. Bring markers. Other answers and comments have provided details, but this would be odd. You, a friend, should certainly not do this. Following a polite email (see below), it would make sense for the affected student to do this but it is not their responsibility to bring these materials as an accommodation for their disability (see also this answer). I'm not really sure this would work well, either.

Next, I would take the following steps.

4. Ask the professor to change markers. I mentioned in a comment she may be reluctant to do that, since she's presumably using multiple colors for a reason. But maybe she's willing to change. You don't say whether your friend has emailed and asked politely "I have poor vision and have trouble seeing the (yellow/green/etc.) markers. Could you avoid using those?"

5. Next, your friend reaches out to the disability office. In order to reach out to the disability office, they need some sort of documentation of their low vision. Probably they have this already, but a letter from their primary-care provider would usually suffice. Because this might take a while, do this, while asking the professor directly about what she can do.

   a. The disability office might be able to move the whole class.

   b. Direct the professor to use suitable markers and allow an exception to the no-photos policy.

   c. Get window film added quickly.

Notes on emailing the professor:

It's easy to imagine a context where the student simply wrote "I have a hard time seeing the whiteboard because of the glare from the window." and the professor, with a lot else to do said "Dang, sorry" and moved on.

Your friend should write an email, explaining they have a medical condition, that they are working with the disability office, but in the meantime, is there anything she can do, like using different pens.

Answer 3

Have the student in question go to the school's accessibility office and tell them about their problem.

That office is the dedicated contact point for solving problems like these (individually and immediately). Doing anything else is over-complicating the situation and likely to be a waste of time and other resources.

Answer 4

In the US (not sure about Canada), usually such things are handled by official channels. Check out accommodation services or anything related to disabilities, and work something out. Those official channels should be able to recommend.

Buying markers yourself is "nice", but is not how to properly do it at my school -- or I imagine at most schools, and should be ideally considered as a secondary resort.

Answer 5

Universities are bureaucracies and that requires a certain way of communication. Learning that is probably one of the most useful skills a student can acquire at a university.

I suspect that your friend asked something like: "Can I take pictures of the whiteboard, because ...?" In a bureaucratic context this means that the teacher has received the following task: "decide whether pictures can be taken or not". Once that teacher decided (or applied university guidelines) and communicated that decision, the task is done and no further action is necessary. If your friend started with "I cannot read the whiteboard, because ....", then the task for the teacher would have become "find a way such that the student can read the whiteboard". The common mistake students have when communicating with bureaucracies is to start with what they think the solution is rather than the problem that needs to be solved.

Another thing about proper communication in a context like that is gifts. This is culturally specific, but in Western Europe, where I am from, a gift from a student to a professor would be a huge problem. There is no way I would accept such a gift directly or indirectly, however small, practical or otherwise it may be. It does not matter what the intentions are of the involved parties. This is not going to happen. Absolutely no exceptions. Buying markers for me falls in that category. So that is one problem with your proposed solution on top of the pretty mean implied insult that gift represents as indicated by @Neinstein .

So effectively navigating a bureaucracy like a university can be quite tricky, and many students need a "translator"; someone on the inside who is willing to take the time to explain who to talk to and what to ask. All the departments I worked for had such a person. This could be either a person with a job-title like "student-advisor" whose only job is to help students navigate the university or a regular teacher/researcher who has that as one of her/his/their many tasks. So finding that person and talking to that person would be a place to start. Alternatively, if you can find the disability office at your university, then the people who work there could play that role for this particular problem.

Answer 6

This is one of the many reasons I dislike whiteboards--I have the same problem. In general, the lecturer and the university is responsible for making reasonable accommodations. I teach a large section class every other term and I encounter just about every accommodation request. Most are pretty reasonable since they have to go through the students with disabilities office before I will approve them.

My workaround for this is to use MS Notes and Teams and write my lectures using an Apple pen on my iPad. I started doing this during the pandemic and it works. Also, I find it a good practice to avoid certain colors. A good friend of mine is red/green color blind, so I try not to use red/green combinations and avoid using a laser pointer.

Answer 7

How about asking the teacher if their whiteboard writeup is based on written notes and if they'd be willing to share those with the student having accessibility issues?

Answer 8

I am going to assume that the bureaucratic obstacles have been cleared (perhaps with the help of the school's accessibility office, as others have suggested) and all that remains is the technical issues.

A few suggestions:

(1) Rearrange the classroom so that the teacher stands at the other end and uses the whiteboards at the other end. (This obviously only works if the room does have whiteboards at the other end.) This will reverse the angle of the sunlight on the functioning whiteboard, and may fix the glare problem. (Source: a teacher who unofficially flipped a classroom so that students entered and left from the rear, to make late arrivals less disruptive.)

(2) Close the window shade or shades that block the sun. (Source: an office where throughout the day we close the shade on the one window with sun glare and open the others.). It may be possible to request that shades be installed to make the room more universally accessible; this will also likely lower utility bills.

(2a) Get a portable shade (photography websites have instructions to make cheap light shades and backdrops) to block the worst of the sun glare.

(3) Buy a large set of whiteboard markers. Pick the two or three colors that are most visible for you, and ask the teacher to use those. (Source: a few decades playing board games with colorblind and low-vision people.)

Answer 9

We decided to gift the teacher a big new thick 10mm chisel 'Big Nib' marker from a premium brand, Artline. This is the thickest I found on Amazon, though other respected brands, like Pilot, offer even thicker models.

I'm not sure if it was a calculated strategy or if things just happened this way, but my friend waited until the teacher's marker started to dry out by the end of the class. At that moment, my friend offered her the new thick premium marker.

My friend allowed the teacher to keep the marker. Both the teacher and students are happy with the new marker so far.

I understand that some teachers might be offended by such gifts, but it worked in this case. Also the teacher put the marker into the desk box, so, perhaps, it counts as a gift to the school rather than the teacher. And school administration knows nothing about it, I guess.

Answer 10

A portable blackboard could probably be found for close to free. They're more environmentally friendly anyway.