You may want to engage students in activities that may help them understand or appreciate accessibility from a new perspective.
Here are a few short activities that PWR lecturer Lindsey Felt designed:
PWR 1
Have students analyze an excerpt from a text like Jean Dominique-Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (this text was composed letter by letter using only his left eye to blink). You might ask how the body—or hand—is tied to notions of writing and inscription. Can also raise questions about the paradigm of the abled body to write/compose and revise.
You might use another example of a text written by a disabled scholar like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, or Georgina Kleege, who use speech-to-text technologies to compose their works. Can we discern a difference?
PWR 2
Consider showing students a speaker who challenges conventional notions of what a “good man speaking well” is: ted talks: stutter, non-sighted, sign language, etc. Ask students to consider how these differences contribute to speaking style and performance. Can these differences be rhetorical? (See resources handout for some videos that present alternate speaking paradigms.)
Consider asking students to perform their talks through nonverbal or non traditional oral performance means: gesture, native language, seated/standing, with their back to the audience, find ways to challenge their own physical comfort and the parameters of the speaker/audience.
