Summary of course taken

When I took my GCSEs and A'levels I used a laptop, screen reader and Microsoft Offiice plus a Perkins Brailler for notes. Now I am taking a degree in Politics and French, which is a combined honours degree and I am in my second year at the University of Northampton. I find I am depending more on my Braille Lite for notes, a scanner and recorder as well as the laptop and Perkins Brailler.

Description of strategies used.

I’ve tried voice recorders for recording lectures. I have a scanner in my room so that if we get handouts I can scan them and read them with some software called Kurzweil, which has a screen reader built into it so you can quite happily read your notes. Whatever you’ve scanned it will read, as long as it’s not a graph or an image. If it’s text it will read it, because obviously the screen reader has to see text to be able to read it.

I use mainly MS Word actually because of typing stuff up, but I do have the full Office package on my computer should I need it. I also used Course Genie for doing my web project for French this year. I didn’t actually know about Course Genie until Rob told me about it, because I was looking at ways of doing my project and Geraldine didn’t know and so we talked to Rob and he suggested Course Genie because it’s an add-on to Word and he felt it might work with the screen reading software and it does, it works brilliantly with it I have to say.

Podcasts of lectures if you miss them would be brilliant, because it would mean I could make my own notes instead of downloading the lecturer’s notes, which is fine, having the lecturer’s notes is brilliant because you know what they’re trying to aim to look at in the lecture, but sometimes lectures don’t go that way. I asked one of my lecturers if I could record the lecture and she said “no, because if we record it, then it turns into more of a lecture seminar format and I like to work in a discussion format.” None of my other lecturers have objected, but I tend not to and just download the lecture notes anyway, because it just makes it easier that way. I don’t see the point in changing my strategy for one particular lecturer.

Last year I had a study facilitator, aka a note-taker. This year it’s all about me being independent and using other ways of taking my notes, what I do and being lazy, is just download the lecturer’s notes!

For my French course we have to do on-line activities using a bit of software called Hot Potatoes which is useless, because it’s not very friendly towards screen readers. If certain things aren’t designed in a way which is friendly towards my screen reader, if I struggle to navigate pages of notes or what have you, then I find I just give up. It very rarely happens, but there have been times, like for the last year we had presentations we had to do for French, but we had to use OHT’s. Otherwise we used to have to produce a sheet that went with the presentation, like a document, and I used to have to get that e-mailed to me. Now if there were tables in that, you had to set them out in a very standard way, you couldn’t have a non-standard table, one of those funny shaped things, you’d have to have just a plain table. If you’d pulled it off a website, well fine, but then edit it, because otherwise I can’t read it.

There are things such as, if you get something that’s particularly well laid out and you can read it, you go back over it, it’s interesting, it’s there, fantastic! and it makes you want to learn more.

(This interview was conducted as part of the E4L Learner's experience project with thanks to Dr Gemma Towle)