First Person Accounts

Overview

First person accounts should motivate your research and arguments. A first person account is a description by a disabled person of their experiences, needs and goals with respect to an accessibility topic.

Best practices for First Person Accounts

First person accounts are a way of doing your homework, before you consider approaching the disability community. Such accounts are typically found on YouTube, social media, or a blogging platform. They are so prevalent that studies of them are beginning to come out (e.g., communities on youtuble and tiktok.

A first person account is written or presented by someone who

Uses a technology of some kind on a regular basis
Has a disability
Describes first person concerns such as:
- How do they the use device to meet their needs?
- In what ways does it help?
- In what ways does it fall short?
- Is their use of the AT specific to needs in their life (i.e. commuting, work)?
- What improvements or changes would they like to see?

A first person account that meets the requirements of this assignment is not

a teaching video/presentation
an advertisement.
based on your personal experience
Based on experiences of your peers or the course staff

If you have an existing relationship with a disability community, early phase input from that community can also address this and is strongly encouraged in your research more generally. However, while we know that some of you may have engaged with or interviewed people with disabilities, we ask that explore what is on social media for this particular competency. Research papers may quote people, but this is filtered through the researchers interpretation.

Example

Here is a personal perspective on audio crosswalks and here is an interview with two black AAC users about their experiences using AAC technology (start at 00:16:00)

Summary of what we see here:

Daniel describes how he uses audio books. Audio Books are books that are read by a (typically human) narrator. You can listen to them at various speeds. He shows how to use a reader. They are free to people with print disabilities, and can be sped up and quick to consume. This is not a scripted teaching video or advertisement.
He does not talk much about how it falls short but mentions it is free. Note, if it stopped here, this first person account would receive a “competent” but not “excellent” grade because of its lack of commentary on pros and cons and relative lack of detail. One weakness I worry about is that it could be difficult to search them, or share a particular passage with someone else, or take notes on a passage and find it again. I couldn’t find a lot of information about this, and I think it is somewhat disability specific. For example, here is a first person account by a sighted person who uses audio books about how he takes notes on them. Clearly that is very different than what a blind person would do. This student has clearly done a lot of research, and found some evidence to address the weakness they mention. However, this is still only competent because they don’t have a first person account of the potential weakness
Audio books are used by people who are blind or low vision, as well as people who are dyslexic or cannot look at a screen without experiencing chronic illness symptoms such as nausea or cannot turn a page easily due to a motor impairment, and described on bookshare.org [2], a website that provides free audio and digital books to students with IEP plans, as well as non-disabled readers [3].

Audiobooks for the Blind, Linc Inc.
Bookshare.org. Supported by U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Award Number H327D220002).
Benefits of Audiobooks for All Readers Denise Johnson, Ed Tech and Digital Media.

Typical Handin for this Competency

A link to the first person account
A reflection answering the following questions

What first person account did you find and does it meet the requirements for a first person account described above
What are the barriers and opportunities the person described?
What technology did they describe using?
How might what you learned extend beyond this specific person, disability and/or technology?
A list of additional resources you used to answer these questions (first person accounts, research papers, etc). If you use Generative AI, you still need to check and cite relevant references.