Bringing Equity to Data with Assistive Tech
By Cary Supalo, Sarah Wood, Ben Iiams
May 9, 2023
An accomplished chemist, a research scientist, and an assessment program manager walk into a hotel lounge.
This is quite literally how the California Transcribers and Educators for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CTEBVI) 2023 Conference began for ETS. On April 20, ETS’s Cary Supalo, Accessibility Research Developer; Sarah Wood, Accessibility Scientist; and Ben Iiams, Associate Product Operations Director, convened at the conference with a shared task of learning and sharing new developments in accessible technology with the blind and visually impaired (B&VI) community of California. This technology will bring ETS closer to the goal of equitable assessments and perhaps more importantly, equity in society, and CTEBVI gracefully puts that shared goal at center stage.
The theme of this year’s conference, “Together Again: Expanding Access” is fitting, as this is the first in-person CTEBVI since 2019, while expanding access to a community with such unique challenges is a touchstone of this event. ETS’s role in the conference this year was to showcase the emergence and importance of multiline braille displays. Cary Supalo, joined by Greg Williams of Independence Science (IS), and William Freeman of American Printing House for the Blind (APH), spent an hour-long session discussing the need for these devices to be more commonplace for the B&VI community.
Highlighting the status quo of this technology is important for context. All too commonly in today’s world, blind and visually impaired students are held back by the one-line refreshable braille devices we use. These tools are useful and endlessly valuable but are limited to a single line of braille characters between 14 and 80 characters in length. What this means is that most braille users can read text alone, and much less quickly than sighted counterparts can. Single-line devices also limit B&VI users in a much more crucial way— there is no easy way to read complex pieces of data, tactile graphics, or many types of equations on a single-line device. This limitation creates an egregious gap in equity for B&VI users, and multiline refreshable braille displays strive to fill that gap.
Multiline braille displays are fascinating in their complexity and stunning in their simplicity. The intelligent display of everything from long division to fractions, from Venn diagrams to algebraic expressions, “will promote more equity in literacy and learning for braille readers, as well as promoting more equity in education, assessment, and in the economy and society as a whole” according to Supalo. The advancements possible with the emergence of these multiline devices include too many benefits to describe in detail here, but Supalo says that “new technologies have the potential to go beyond the static braille page to electronically delivered literary and technical braille content and real-time graphical braille” in a way that could prove useful in myriad ways for advancing equitability.
The Cadence® refreshable braille display by Tactile Engineering, presented at CTEBVI by Williams, is a modular display with up to 4 modules, each module consists of 4 lines by 12 cells per line, with a maximum of 8 lines by 24 cells. The user interface displays what is visible on the display for sighted users. The Cadence can deliver data in tables, line graphs, and tactile graphics in addition to the increased text size when needed. A favorite feature of this device is its ability to simulate graphics like cellular mitosis and phases of the moon, delivered to students via a moving tactile display. The portability and configurability the Cadence offers allows it to be scaled dependent on student or user need, a major benefit for travelling users and classroom dynamics.
The Monarch® device is like a large tablet with a Perkins-style Braille entry keyboard built in. Presented at CTEBVI by Freeman from APH, it is designed in part to “bridge the educational gap for students” says Freeman. The Monarch, colored similarly to the butterfly subspecies of the same name, provides a 10-by-32 cell refreshable braille display with many of the same characteristics and capabilities of the Cadence. This device is also designed with the advent of a new braille file type, eBRF, in mind. These new eBRF files will allow for a much more meaningful user experience. The richer eBRF will allow students and users to navigate from the braille display to other chapters of text, to zoom in and out of tactile graphics, and to jump to tagged content within the file.
Wood, an accessibility research scientist in the Accessibility Standards and Inclusive Technology group at ETS, calls these new devices a “game changer” for the B&VI community and educational assessment innovations. The potential is now there to introduce simulations in science content, display usable advanced mathematics on a single page, and travel more easily through much larger pieces of text than ever — and in fractions of the time spent with earlier technology.
Supalo believes “physical braille will always be necessary as one important tool in the access toolbox” for our B&VI colleagues and students. Multiline braille displays, however, are another, equally important member of the tool kit, particularly as we reach for ways to develop more interactive and exciting performance-oriented test content to drive useful educational assessment data.
To be at the forefront of providing equitable assessment data imbues ETS with inherent responsibilities. We proudly carry the charge, holding ourselves to the highest standard for the breadth, integrity and quality of each piece of data. We accomplish this through careful approaches to assessment design and development, administration tools, test delivery best practices, and on to dissemination of our data in meaningful and usable ways. To suggest that this is all possible within our organization would be accurate but vague. The community that CTEBVI provides will help us get closer to understanding the perfection we seek. It is this community that consists of numerous teachers of the visually impaired (TVI)s that directly oversee how K–12 assessments are conducted for students with BVI in California and having this direct conduit to this community will be extremely valuable for ETS moving forward. The lived experiences of the blind and visually impaired are glaring proof that we’re getting closer to fulfilling our most closely held commitment to expanding equity in education all over the world.
Last, we would like to extend our gratitude to ETS’s Celebrating the Abilities of Everyone Business Resource Group, under the umbrella of the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I), for their support in our participation in this conference.