Somebody help me out here. Ok, what do they give blind people in lieu of the regular textbooks? So, why can’t they just keep the status quo for the blind students and allow everyone else to use Kindles. They’re at no more of an disadvantage than they were before.
Granted, I graduated from BU in ‘80, but while I was in school the “gave” me nothing at all. All books were purchased with real cash money, and engineering texts weren’t cheap...
Besides, since they can’t actually read the screens, all they’d have to do is to show them how to use the ON/OFF button, then they’d be “equal” to everybody else.
Under ADA, educational institutions are required to make “reasonable accomodations” for blind and visually impaired students. Now part of that depends of the level of impairment. For the visually impaired, they provide reprinted textbooks with much larger print. There are software programs that make everything on a monitor much, much bigger, as well, and that is installed on whatever computer the student will be accessing. For the blind, they either retype in Braille or use a reader who puts the textbooks on audio. Some things are beyond the scope of “reasonable” and cannot be accomodated.
I had a student who was legally blind, but still had some (very limited) vision. I made copies of all the course materials with much larger fonts. Disability Services hired a reader to make audio recordings of the text we were using, and we installed the “zoom” software program on the computer she used for the labs. She did very well.