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Welcome. This is a typical classroom here at the University of Delaware. And one
of the first things that I notice about accessibility when I walk in is the tiered seating. There
is space for wheelchair access behind these desks right here, but we would need to move
these chairs out of the way to make sure that a wheelchair is there, or someone who needed
to sit there without a chair was able to get there.
Here is another classroom here at the University of Delaware. Right behind me are a bunch of windows, and you can see on the
video that my face is really dark and hard to see. For a deaf person, trying to work
with an interpreter, it would be very hard to understand and work with an interpreter when the lighting
is difficult. And you can't see my hands as I'm moving them right now. One way to alleviate
this, a simple solution is to position the interpreter off to the side, which allows
some light to shine on their face and allows a deaf person to work with the interpreter
effectively. That might be one easy solution.
We're here in a regular classroom at the University of Delaware. One of the things that you'll notice is that these are moveable chairs.
We can drag them across the floor. But it's tiered seating, so there's limited space
in which the chairs can be moved around. So one thing to pay attention to is creating
movement, room for people to move throughout the room. Whether that person is the interpreter,
someone showing up late, someone in a wheelchair who needs to make space to sit. Be thinking
about ways that you can arrange the chairs or facilitate movement throughout the room.
As you prepare for a conference session, one of the other things to be aware of is whether all
of the presenters are going to be using a PowerPoint or projecting from a screen.
If a presenter is not going to be projecting from a screen, please try to turn off the
projector, or arrange for it to be covered up in some way. So that you don't have the
visual annoyance of the blue screen or bright lights behind the speaker, which can be difficult
for a person watching the presentation to process. Relatedly, the projectors create
noise. There s a background hum that can be distracting for people listening to the presentation,
and the more you can eliminate that noise, the better.
I feel like I mean, I kind of thought about this, but I didn't script it, because I didn't exactly...
VIDEOGRAPHER: Right. And when you watch this, you'll get way more ideas, so... (VOICES OVERLAP.)
STEPHANIE: And I feel like I really need to, I mean, really, I'm not a great start at the beginning and invent
all my ideas. I m really, a little bit, share, get ideas. VIDEOGRAPHER: Right, right. Yeah.
STEPHANIE: I feel like really I need to send these videos and get feedback.