First some background: I have been blind all my life and had, before I needed to wear hearing aids, excellent O&M skills and loads of confidence. I am now a senior citizen and work as a paraprofessional at a community college. I still have the confidence but do ask for help in noisy environments.
My main job is to assist sighted students with learning disabilities: making sure they have alternate format textbooks and appropriate reading software. I am basically the assistant to our assistive technology professor. Though we do have a few blind students, they need less help with academic accommodations than our students with learning disabilities. However, I am asked to assist them, especially when the professor is unavailable.
But one thing that I find really lacking in my sighted colleagues is that they do not know how to orient the blind students to a new space. Our college is 112 acres and all our blind students ride the shuttle for the physically disabled to get around campus.
I have arthritis, and walk with a limp, but I only use that shuttle when I must be somewhere on time and my pace is too slow to get there quick enough.
I love mobility instructors, but they cannot be around for every situation. And our sighted staff make so many mistakes, which I’m going to outline below. I hope paraprofessionals reading this will take note:
Don’t walk the student through a space and expect they know where to go. Remember, you are looking around at stuff. Your student is being guided, ten yards straight, make a right, four yards straight, make a left, a few steps further, and then a sharp right – watch out for that pole .. you get the idea. This is not the rich visual experience you have.
When guiding the student, fill their head with the experience of the place. Of course I’m talking about a teenaged or older student, not a little child who is still learning to navigate independently. But when guiding this teen, you must supply the important visual information they are missing. “You will pass four doors and a water fountain, the men’s restroom and then a fire extinguisher. After that you turn right down a hallway, and the women’s restroom is three doors down on your left.”.
Or: “You can enter this building via stairs or a ramp. The ramp is on the right or east end of the building, the stairs are in the center, and if you are at the far west end, facing the building, then you are in front of a big green lawn.”
I cannot tell you how often I had a student dropped off by paratransit and guided up the ramp, not realizing they were at the same building because another person had guided them up the stairs. When their driver guided them up that ramp, the student of course thought they’d been dropped off at the wrong building.
The other thing you must do when showing a space to a student is tell them what they will encounter if they make a wrong turn. “If you turn right too soon, you’ll find a bunch of bike racks”. or “If you keep going straight you’ll know you passed the building, because you will feel the path sloping upward.”
This information is crucial because any independent traveler is going to eventually make a wrong turn. The more they know about what they will encounter, the better they will be able to recover and return to a known starting point. “If you encounter a cyclone fence, no worries, you just made too sharp of a turn. It’s a gradual right, not a sharp right”.
Too often, beginning O&M training has students crossing streets and navigating sidewalks. But a business park, a college campus and an outdoor shopping mall are places where those skills are of little use. So it is vital that the student begins to build a mental map of what can be a very confusing space.
Next, in this hopefully friendly rant, I’d like to destroy the myth that the blind person now knows the route because you showed it to him. Orientation skills take practice, but talent is also involved. My sighted husband is a superb reader of maps. But my dad could not follow a map if his life depended on it. My mom had much better spatial skills. We all know sighted folks who get lost easily and others with great orientation “tallent”: It is no different if you are blind.
I personally need to be shown a route at least three times. But I have the confidence to get out there and explore and figure it out on my own. I also ask a lot of questions when I’m being guided somewhere: for me being guided is not a passive experience, as I want to take advantage of my sighted friend’s ability to describe the environment. Your students may be more passive; I was when I was young!
When I started working at the college, one of my sighted students was struggling to find the library. I knew where it was, so I walked him there. When we arrived, he told me the sign read “Learning Center” not “Library” which is why he had trouble finding it. I then began to catalog what all the signs on our campus read. I asked sighted friends, but later, I used AI apps on my phone to read signs to me. Now I can confidently ask my phone to read me a sign and that too helps me stay oriented. It is a skill I try to impart to my blind students, so they too will be able to read signs and use that information to fill in the gaps. “Do you see any signs” is a question I often ask a passerby, and if they tell me that I’m at audio-visual services, I know that’s the back end of the library. AI apps can now give enough information that this too can help orient one to a space. So don’t forget when guiding a person, to tell them about visible signage. And if they like to record your explanations using their phone or digital recorder, by all means, do it.
And try to orient buildings in relation to each other “The gym is behind the cafeteria and our classroom is facing the front doors of the cafeteria, but if you go out the side door to our classroom I showed you, you are actually facing a side door to the gym. That’s because the gym is a much bigger building and it’s got two wings”.
And if you are working with a younger child, teach them to be proactive about asking questions about the route. Teach them to ask “What happens if I don’t make a right turn here?”" or "“Did we pass the cafeteria already?” or “Whose office is to the right of yours, and whose is to the left?”. Proactively ensuring you understand a route and getting as much information as possible is the key to successful travel, and it is us paraprofessionals who can do the most to help our blind students succeed. Unfortunately I don’t think this is happening often enough or we’d see more students using their canes on campus instead of depending on the shuttle for the physically impaired.
Just because you walked them once to and from the science building does not mean they now no longer need help.
Be patient and remember that you’d do much worse blindfolded!