Talking Tools to Assist Students Who are Blind in Laboratory Courses

A number of tools and techniques have been developed to assist students with blindness and visual impairment who are studying in secondary and post-secondary science laboratories. Commercial electronic probes and their associated software packages allow real-time viewing and collection of data using a personal computer; however, until now, these data have been inaccessible to students with blindness or visual impairment because of the incompatibility of the data acquisition software with screen-reading software. Recent programming modifications now allow a new level of compatibility, which promotes a greater degree of independence and accessibility to laboratory science for people with visual impairments.