Teaching Science to the Visually Impaired: Purdue University's Visions Lab‪.‬

The areas of science and mathematics have traditionally been inaccessible to students with visual impairments. Complex and high-tech fields such as Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Biology, and Mathematics are rife with visually-presented concepts and information. Historically, this complex visual information has not been made available for widespread use in a format easily accessible to blind and visually impaired students. This lack of information, in turn, leads to decreased interest in scientific fields by the blind, and thus few visually impaired scientists exist to provide standards for imparting scientific knowledge to the blind and to serve as mentors and role models for those visually impaired students who wish to pursue careers in the sciences. The Purdue University VISIONS Lab, which stands for Visually Impaired Students Initiative ON Science, is a research laboratory dedicated to providing access to the numerous science courses at Purdue. Since its inception in the summer of 1995, this university-funded lab has served as a production facility for providing visually impaired students with educational materials and as a research lab for developing new adaptive technologies. Interestingly, the VISIONS Lab was part of a university-wide response to the problems that visually impaired students face when attending a major university, and included the efforts of individuals from the Office of the President to the individual Teaching Assistants themselves, and everyone in between. As of Spring 1996, the VISIONS Lab has worked with two blind pre-medicine majors and one low-vision graduate student in Chemistry. The VISIONS Lab has been involved with course work from many different departments, including but not limited to Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Biology, Agronomy, and Spanish. As can be seen, the VISIONS Lab has rapidly expanded beyond its initial design to become a gestalt facility, encompassing and supporting the daily needs of the students as well as predicting and planning for future needs.