Inclusion for Students with Visual Impairments: Overcoming Barriers Together with Jonathan Hooper ~ 1334

Jonathan Hooper: I once had a student, a completely blind middle schooler who had no other disability classifications other than just having no light perception. He thought that you bought toast at a grocery store, right? Because he had never seen anyone take bread and toast it. Because that’s not something you might narrate to a child. When you’re in the kitchen, you might not narrate, “I’m taking bread out of the bag and toasting it, and now I have toast,” right?

And so that’s a really good example of—that doesn’t mean that he has the inability to learn anything. It’s just he didn’t have the access to that information. And I think for me, inclusion means finding out what this person wants to be included in, right? And obviously the academics—they might not wanna be included in the academics, maybe. But in addition to the academics, finding out what this person wants to be included in and finding ways to make them included in that.

Tim Villegas: Hey, friends. Welcome back to Think Inclusive: Real Conversations About Building Schools Where Every Learner Belongs. I’m your host, Tim Villegas. Today’s episode is about what it actually looks like to include students who are blind or have visual impairments, not just in academics, but in recess, field trips, dance class, and everything in between. The question isn’t really whether it’s possible, it’s whether we’ve set up the systems to make it happen.

Jonathan Hooper is a certified teacher of students with visual impairments and assistive technology professional, a CTVI and ATP, who spent 12 years as an itinerant vision teacher in New York City, and now works at Pediatric VIEW at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, along with Dr. Christine Roman-Lantzy, specializing in CVI and complex support needs. He also builds accessible digital resources for educators through his site jonathantvi.com.

What makes Jonathan’s perspective distinctive is that he started as a general education teacher and became a TVI because of a student in his classroom who wasn’t getting the support he needed. We talk about why vision and cognition are not the same thing, what presuming competence really means in practice, and why inaccessible digital curricula create a cascade of problems that most districts don’t even see coming. And Jonathan shares a workaround he discovered under deadline pressure, a trick with YouTube and phone dictation that he’d been using for years before a colleague walked by, did a double take, and said, “What are you doing?”

Before we meet our guest, I wanna tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by IXL. IXL is an all-in-one platform for K-12 that helps boost student achievement, empowers teachers, and tracks progress in one place. As students practice, IXL adapts to their individual needs so that every learner gets just-right support and challenge, and each student gets a personalized learning plan to close gaps. Check it out at ixl.com/inclusive. Again, that’s ixl.com/inclusive.

All right, after a quick break, it’s time to think inclusive with Jonathan Hooper. Catch you on the other side.

Jonathan Hooper, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast.

Jonathan Hooper: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Tim Villegas: I’m excited too. You might be the very first teacher—I don’t even know how you say your title. How do you say your title?

Jonathan Hooper: It’s typically written as TVI or CTVI. It’s teacher of students with visual impairments.

Tim Villegas: Okay. Great.

Jonathan Hooper: And obviously it does not surprise me that I’m the first, because we’re very low incidence and we’re rare.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. It’s also not because I didn’t know you existed, but there’s a couple things, right? So you may not know this about me, but our audience does—I was a special education teacher in classrooms, and some of my students with complex support needs also had visual impairments, and some had CVI. And so I did work with teachers like yourself who would come into my classroom and provide support, whether that’s training or modeling. So I was exposed to your role.

But how this is relevant to our audience: if you’ve been working in special education in the field for long enough, you probably have had some sort of interaction with your role. But it’s really about the inclusive nature of this type of work. I know I gave you a bunch of questions, but I’m just gonna start like this, because I think where this is all coming from is, a lot of times, schools are like, “That student has such a significant visual impairment that there’s no way we could ever include them in general education in a classroom.” And most of the time when I talked with someone that had your role, they’re like, “Actually, we just do this and this, and that’s fine.” But the assumption is that we can’t. So maybe let’s start there.

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. I love that. I think about it a lot as fitting a round peg in a square hole. I think that people often have experience with students with disability classifications that are grounded in a discrepancy between typical performance and that student’s performance, right? Like academic performance, and okay, now you get additional special ed services and that sort of thing. Visual impairment is really grounded in having a severe visual impairment. So it’s just in the very nature of getting that service—the service that we provide is just grounded on a medical report and the effect of that student’s vision on their functioning.

In general—every state kind of does things maybe a little different—but the idea of it is really grounded in a visual impairment, and then, what is the student doing? What do they need to be able to do? And then the mandate, or the service—how much you see that student—is grounded in the assessments and stuff that we do with them after that. But it’s just so different. And I say all that to say—it’s so different. I meet with teams and I will train them at the beginning of the year, and I see that same conversation. If I have been asked one time if this student should be at a school for the blind, I have been asked that question a thousand times, okay?

And it’s hard, ’cause I don’t wanna say that every student with a visual impairment should be in a gen ed setting, because we have a continuum of placements, and there’s a reason for schools for the blind to exist—for specialized schools. I don’t want it to sound like I discount those specialized schools. I think that is a more restrictive environment. And so I would hope that a student would be considered for that initially, and then hopefully can be served in the communities they’re in.

And I think one of the other things that’s tricky—when you mention that you talk to a vision teacher and they say, “Oh, all we have to do is XYZ”—the problem is that XYZ is typically a service that a district or a school is unfamiliar with. Like, for instance, if you have a totally blind student in your class, you’re going to need someone who is making the braille for your student, not being in front of them, right? So having an indirect service. And these indirect services are necessary for that student’s access in the general education environment, or in a more inclusive environment, but there are systems in place and policies where districts don’t have the mechanism to give that service because it’s not student-facing. Because typically we think of related services and services from special educators as a direct service with the student. Maybe some training might happen at the beginning of the year or whatever, but we don’t often think of a weekly service being something that’s not student-facing, in many districts. And so I think we need to stop thinking about what the systems and the policies currently are and start thinking about what they should be for these students. Does that make sense?

Tim Villegas: Yeah. And I also wanna echo what you said about schools for the blind. I think we—we as in MCIE, and inclusion advocates in general—need to do a better job of upholding those spaces as historically and culturally relevant for people who are deaf and blind.

Jonathan Hooper: Deafness especially. That’s the tricky piece. The deaf community—and I don’t wanna speak for them, but from the conversations I’ve had with deaf adults—that’s a barrier to language and language acquisition, right? That’s a very valid schools-for-the-deaf rationale. But schools for the blind, though—having a visual impairment is an inability to access the environment. So if you can adapt the environment and provide access to those visual things, a lot of students can function in a more inclusive setting.

Now, I’ve had students who could function in a more inclusive setting, but they chose to go to a school for the blind because they had albinism and they were bullied in their schools. And that should be addressed, right? But they felt more comfortable around other people with albinism and stuff like that. There’s reasons for those schools.

And when I think about that model—’cause I worked at a school for the blind before being an itinerant vision teacher—I think there are benefits to being in a school for the blind, because all of your things are adapted by people who know how to adapt things for people with visual impairment. But the caveat is you don’t have any experience with people who don’t know blindness. And if you’re going to be going to college or in a job setting, it’s—not important to have those experiences, but it’s more of a realistic world preparation type of scenario—to be in a setting where you might be asked a question that you think is offensive, that then you can talk to your vision teacher about and say, “Hey, this person asked me this. What’s up with that?” And then you can have that conversation. If you’re in a school for the blind, that might happen not as much, you know?

Tim Villegas: Sure. Yeah, I think those are all valid points and things that we should talk about and not shy away from. So I thank you for bringing that up.

I’m wondering—you specifically, Jonathan—why did you go into becoming a teacher for students with visual impairment?

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. So I kinda bounced around in my undergraduate studies and landed in elementary education. I had an elective of teaching PE—my gym class was teaching PE to kindergartners—and I thought it was so much fun that I changed my major to elementary education. So then I taught as a general education teacher, in reading and math initially, and in my first or second year, I had a student with a visual impairment in my class. And because of the low incidence nature and school funding and all of this stuff—underfunded schools versus a field that doesn’t have a lot of practitioners equals no support for a general education teacher, right?

So I saw the vision teacher, or the TVI, when school started. They dropped off the large print textbooks, told me to have a great year, and I saw them at the end of the year when they picked them back up. So I had this student with a visual impairment in my class that was reported to me as not being motivated to read, not liking reading. Behavioral, you could say—people would maybe use that language to describe the student. And I was like, “How on earth am I gonna teach this student?” I have these humongous textbooks, and in talking with him, he was like, “I hate those textbooks. They’re bigger than my desk.”

So I did a lot of Googling on how to work with him, how to get accessible materials for him in ways that weren’t alienating—in ways that weren’t like a two-foot-tall book or something. And I switched over to making all of his stuff just in a larger font on regular-sized paper. And by the end of that school year, he was on grade level in reading. He enjoyed reading. He was coming to school. And it was all just from me having no idea what I was doing and Googling a bunch of stuff. A lot of stuff didn’t work, ’cause I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a gen ed teacher. But we found some things that did, that helped him access the print and enjoy my class.

And so from there, in all my Googling, I found a teacher prep program for vision a couple hours away, and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna quit my job and go become a vision teacher,” ’cause obviously they need them. And so that’s how I fell into this—from having a student, seeing what accommodations can do for that student, and then being like, “Okay, I’m gonna change my whole trajectory of my career to become a vision teacher.”

Tim Villegas: Wow. So first it was the PE, and then it was the vision.

Jonathan Hooper: First was PE, then it was reading, and then it was vision.

Tim Villegas: Ah, there you go. Since we talk about low incidence—I know a lot of people know what that means, but essentially it’s just the occurrence of a particular disability being fairly rare, or low, for a school or a classroom. What are some things that you’d want teachers to know about students who have CVI or dual sensory loss or any sort of need that’s complex like that?

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. So maybe one of the biggest things I would want someone to think about and know is, oftentimes we think about a student—people will walk in and see a student profile, maybe what they look like on paper, what their medical records are, and just automatically think that they are less capable cognitively, academically, just from their medical history, right? What their IEP looks like or what their medical records are. And I think it’s important that we really remember that these people are not the sum of their medical records. And vision is not the same as cognition. Lack of access to information is going to make it sometimes appear like you might not know something or you might not be able to do something, but it could often be grounded in that lack of access, and not lack of ability.

I was an itinerant vision teacher in New York City for 13 years, and I had a really varied caseload. I had all types of students, and that was really great—I pull on that experience a lot. But now I’m in a completely different setting in a specialized hospital, with Pediatric VIEW with Christine Roman, and we work primarily with students with CVI, dual sensory loss, students with complex needs. And one of the big tenets that we think of is presuming competence. So walking in and presuming competence and not asking a student to prove they can do something. I don’t need you to prove to me that you can identify the letter B to know you can identify—you could maybe identify the word “ball” in context or something like that.

And I think that all students with visual impairment have these splinter skills, because things are learned incidentally. I once had a student, a completely blind middle schooler who had no other disability classifications other than just having no light perception. He thought that you bought toast at a grocery store, right? Because he had never seen anyone take bread and toast it. Because that’s not something you might narrate to a child. When you’re in the kitchen, you might not narrate, “I’m taking bread out of the bag and toasting it, and now I have toast,” right?

And so that’s a really good example—that doesn’t mean that he has the inability to learn anything. It’s just he didn’t have the access to that information. And so I think that’s some of the big things that we think about here at Pediatric VIEW, in terms of presuming competence and really walking in there with this idea that the student can do things when given the appropriate supports and the appropriate access.

Tim Villegas: After the break, Jonathan gets into what inclusion looks like beyond academics—lunch tables, recess, and dance class—and he makes a case for rethinking simulation experiences: less about how hard disability is and more about how much the right accommodation changes everything.

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I think part of the reason why we found you—and also just what we know about you—is that you’ve created these CVI-friendly digital books and courses so that you can make this information available to educators. And I’m guessing it’s because you know what it feels like to not know that information.

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, yeah, for sure. I’m so grateful for my background in general ed. I’m a fierce advocate, first of all. So I’m a fierce advocate for my students, but it helps me be a fierce advocate while also knowing that the classroom teachers have a lot on their plates, and that systems need to be created that support their ability to support the students, right? So I’m just so grateful for that background in general ed, because it really gives me a lot of perspective in a lot of situations.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. Do you mind talking a little bit about what you have available?

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, like for digital books and stuff?

Tim Villegas: Yeah, or just any resources.

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. So when we’re thinking about accessible materials, I think one of the big things is that accessible materials, first of all, often benefit all the learners in the class. I just heard this from a team last week, where it was like, “The things that we’re doing for this student—this is really great for all the other students.” And it’s like, yeah, I’m sure, right? That it’s accessible and it’s really clear and it doesn’t have any visual clutter and stuff like that.

I think when thinking about making things accessible, really recognizing that it takes more time for the classroom teachers—that’s one of the things I like to think about a lot. I will try to find ways to build in supports for the classroom teachers, in addition to the supports for my students, onto their IEPs. So what that might look like is adding a weekly meeting to the IEP with the vision teacher and the classroom teacher to co-plan, when possible. I think there’s a lot of things like that.

When we’re thinking about materials and accessible materials, ideally the person who makes them is trained in vision—in whatever the needs of that student are. So if it’s braille materials, it’s someone who is really knowledgeable in creating braille and can make those materials accurately. If it’s a student with CVI, though, those are arguably even more complicated, because there is no dictionary to look up, you know, how to write this word in braille. But with CVI, there’s a lot of things labeled on the internet as CVI-friendly. You could go to Teachers Pay Teachers and download all kinds of stuff that’s “CVI-friendly,” right? And I think when we’re thinking about students with CVI, their materials are really based on them. It’s: What color preferences do they have? What is the thing that they’re learning, and how can we make it visually accessible to them, and make it in a way that’s not gonna be too complex visually and not create visual fatigue and stuff like that? And that’s something that’s difficult for someone who’s not really trained in vision.

Now, in terms of resources: Pediatric VIEW, where I work now—we have a certification program, or course, for becoming certified in giving the CVI Range and working with students with CVI. So that is something for people who are like, “I really wanna learn more about CVI and get better at this.” Pediatric VIEW is housed in the Children’s Home. So if you go to the Children’s Home website, you can find the resources for Pediatric VIEW, and they can also reach out to our program directly.

With Pediatric VIEW, if you have a student with CVI, we do so many things to support teams. We will give direct training to teams. We will work with teams. We will do a full-day observation via Zoom and follow the student around and then do a report. We can even help make materials. We have some students where the classroom teachers will send us materials, and we will just adapt it after having met the student—which is, I think, the important piece: there is no set formula for a student with CVI. It’s very student-driven in terms of making the materials.

Now, if I were pressured to give you a couple of things that a classroom teacher could do to make things more universally accessible for students with visual impairment: What I see a lot, and what I saw during the pandemic so much with all of my teams, was teachers would take a screenshot of text. And that is arguably one of the more frustrating things that vision teachers deal with. Say a classroom teacher is on a website and they’re like, “Oh, that’s great. Let me just take a picture of that.” If you do that, it’s not gonna show up on anyone’s screen reading software if they’re a screen reader user. A vision teacher has to pull that text off of that image. And the crazy thing is, it would probably be just as easy to highlight the text, copy it, and paste it into an actual Word document. So that’s one of the things—when we were talking about this, I was like, “I’m gonna mention this,” because this is a thorn in my heel, okay? Accessible images.

And then, when thinking about just images in general: if you have a student who is maybe a non-visual accessor of materials—so maybe they access the instruction via screen reader or braille or whatever—describing images. If you wanna get really tech-savvy, you can put alt text, alternative text, embedded in your documents. But if you don’t have the tech skills for that, then you can just write it out—write out a little description. And if it’s a decorative image, you can just omit it. Because if it’s just a cute little picture of a dolphin that is just for decoration, that’s something you could omit entirely, at least in my experience.

And then for students with CVI, reducing the visual clutter—so adapting the images to not have backgrounds and things like that. And then when you’re actually talking about images, really using salient feature descriptions—describing the image using qualities that really describe them. An elephant has two big ears and this long snout, right? So really describing the element with the pieces that make it that thing.

And I think while we’re talking about materials, one of the things, as a call to districts: I will often see districts adopting a program that does not work with screen reading software. So it doesn’t work for someone who’s blind, or doesn’t work for someone with a more severe visual impairment. And it’s tricky, because once the district’s paid for that, that program has no reason to change anything about what they do. I think if it were me and I were in charge of the world, one of the things I would do is say a district cannot use federal taxpayer funds to purchase inaccessible online curricula. It seems really crazy that we have to say that, right? But if you’re gonna buy this million-dollar program—which is what these programs cost—it should be accessible, and it should not create a scenario where a vision teacher is now having to remake that entire program, because that’s what happens. You have a student with an online platform that is dynamic. So if it’s dynamic, you have to have a vision teacher sitting next to you, because you can’t get a list of the questions. A lot of these programs are: here’s a question, you get the answer wrong, you get an easier question. So it’s not “here’s a test, make it accessible.” I feel really strongly that that’s something we should change. But that’s a soapbox for another day.

Tim Villegas: No, that’s so true. When I was a teacher, we had these universal screeners for reading, let’s just say. And while I didn’t have a student with a visual impairment, I can imagine that not being accessible, because of what you said—depending on the student’s answer, that determines the next question. And yeah, how frustrating that would be. And you’re right. If a district is receiving money, especially from the feds, it should be accessible for everybody.

Jonathan Hooper: Everybody. And what’s crazy about what I’ve seen in the adoption of those inaccessible programs is it creates this cascade of problems. Because you’ve got a vision teacher that was doing X amount of hours a week to make materials. Now you’ve adopted an inaccessible program, where if you were using a textbook, we could order that textbook, right? We can’t order this “textbook.” So when you’ve got a program that a vision teacher has to manually adapt, it creates an even greater shortage of how much time vision teachers have in a district anyway. So say you have a district that has three vision teachers. You adopt a program that’s inaccessible, and now all of a sudden you’ve got a vision teacher where most of their caseload is this one student’s math program. It creates a lot, that one issue.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. Would you mind telling us a little bit about the programs you helped start, NYC Braille Challenge and Camp Abilities?

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, yeah. So when I was in New York—the Braille Challenge, you could think about it a lot like the National Spelling Bee. It’s a national event that has regional events that you can place in to go nationally. The Braille Challenge is a lot like that. It was created by the Braille Institute—I don’t know how long ago, but a long time ago. And around 10 years ago or so, maybe 11 years, we started the New York City Braille Challenge in New York.

And it’s really a celebration of braille, is how you can think about it. But it’s also a test, okay? They have some academic activities that they do, but it’s also a lot of celebration, because in New York City, most of the students who went there were in inclusive settings. So they were in their general education community school learning braille. They were the only student in that school that read braille, and it’s othering, a little bit, in a way. And so to mitigate a lot of things—celebrating them, but also having them around people that are similar to them, having a community of similar students—we created the New York City Braille Challenge.

It was a big event. So it was not only the actual activities, but also, while the parents were there, we set up concurrent parent trainings. So while the students were testing, we did a lot of parent trainings. We did a lot of blindfold experiences with them and lots of other things. So it was community building for the students. It was celebrating their skills and the things that they’re learning that don’t show up on their report card—your braille is not necessarily gonna be a grade on your report card, probably—but having a moment of celebrating them. That was an amazing event. It’s still going on, without me, in New York. I miss being part of it.

And then Camp Abilities was actually created in New York by Lauren Lieberman, and Camp Abilities is a sports camp for students with visual impairment. So we’re still in the early stages of creating that in New York City. Even though I left, I’m still part of that planning, just because I started it and it’s a lot of fun. Having access to PE—it’s funny that it circles back to PE, right? I’m not an athlete at all, which is really funny. But we often think about academics and access to academics, access to reading. I really like to think about access to play and access to recreation and leisure activities, because that’s part of being a person—having those playful experiences, having access to sports. And that’s really important to me: that the students have not only access to how to play basketball with adaptive materials, but also just how to play a board game, how to play cards. Things like that are social.

And Camp Abilities is similar to the Braille Institute and the Braille Challenge in that they have lots of them all around the country and all around the world. Some of them are a week long and some of them are a weekend. In New York, we’re gonna do something a little unique in that we use public transit and stuff like that in New York. So a little more like day activities—go to upstate New York for the day and do something, or go hiking or something like that.

But I think the recess piece—making sure that my students have access to the social aspects of recess—because for a lot of students, recess is really unpleasant, because it’s often inaccessible, but it’s also unstructured. Recess is often the time when a teacher is not planning an activity. It’s, “Okay, go have free play,” right? And if you don’t have a plan for how your student does free play—how a person with a visual impairment does free play, finds a friend—all the students scatter in the gym or the yard, and now we’ve got a student who can’t find a peer.

When I’m thinking about access, I don’t just think about access to the academics. I’m thinking about access to related services. So if they’re having OT, PT, or speech, are those things accessible? And also music, the lunchroom, recess—all areas of the day, there should be some input from a vision person and the student. Having a plan for, “Okay, great. You’re gonna get your lunch. How do you find your friends at the table that they’re sitting at?”

Tim Villegas: Yeah. And that’s really important, to teach that and allow for the student to be able to access all those environments.

It was something that you said that jogged a memory of mine, and I’m wondering if you ever experienced this. I live in Georgia, even though I work for an organization in Maryland. My wife and I went to this place in Atlanta—I don’t remember the name of it, but it was a dinner-in-the-dark kind of thing. Are you familiar with these?

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, yeah. I’ve been.

Tim Villegas: Okay. Yeah. And so normally I try to be really careful about, quote-unquote, simulations, ’cause I think they can be a little cringey and a little ableist. But what I really liked about this one is that you were led on this experience by someone who was blind or had a visual impairment. And so they were describing to you what you were to be doing, giving instructions. And the whole purpose of this—I appreciated it because it was definitely designed by the blind. And so in that sense, I could get on board. And I honestly didn’t know what to expect. But we went into this room, the person explained what was gonna happen, and then turned off all the lights and stuff, and then just led us through all of these different experiences. And I was like, obviously that doesn’t make me understand blindness. But I did get a different perspective at least, and that has informed how I live and how I experience people. So I’m wondering if that’s something—it sounds like you’ve done that.

Jonathan Hooper: So, yeah. I didn’t wanna go off on a tangent there when I mentioned it, but yes. The thing about the blindfold experiences is you have to be so careful, because what you don’t want is to blindfold a parent and have them struggle, and then think, “My kid cannot do this.”

Tim Villegas: Yeah, great point.

Jonathan Hooper: What you have to think about anytime you’re doing an activity like that under blindfold is: A, you don’t have the training from a vision teacher for the last 13 years in school. You don’t have the compensatory skills to do this. And so that’s key. You have to be really careful.

So what we would do in the New York City Braille Challenge—and anytime I’m doing any sort of vision simulator—I try to focus it on: do something without an accommodation, now do it with. So an example that we did in the New York City Braille Challenge: there’s a little two-minute snippet of Tarzan where a tiger and a baby are kind of flying around, and there are a lot of sounds that are baby sounds, a lot of sounds that are lion sounds, but there’s no words spoken. So what we did with those parents was we blindfolded them, had them watch it just as it is, then we turned on audio description and had them watch it again. And so it’s less about “This is hard—look at the hard experience you’re having,” and more about, “Look at how helpful having an accommodation is. This is why you should be arguing for the accommodations for your child. Because that made no sense to you without audio description, but now you can tell me that there’s a baby and a lion and there’s this gorilla.” Right? And so, what is happening in that? We would do those sorts of things.

Or we had them do a beading activity once, where we gave them beads that were different shapes, mixed them all up in one big bin, and said, “Okay, I want you to make a pattern—an A-B-A-B pattern with a circle and a square bead.” And okay, great—that was pretty hard. Now I’m gonna give you two bins, one with all circles and one with all squares. And now let’s talk about that accommodation.

The other thing I’ve done has been showing them how absolutely jarring it can be to get unrequested assistance. So if they’re beading, I might come up and say, “Oh no, that’s not—” and grab their hand, just how someone without experience in blindness would do. So I try really hard to make sure any sort of simulated experience is really grounded in why you need an accommodation, not how hard it is to be blind or to have a visual impairment. That’s where I’ve always come from with that sort of thing.

Tim Villegas: Those are great examples, and I think that you could apply them to other disabilities too, if, as people are listening or watching, they’re going, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” That totally resonates with me, so I appreciate that.

And so you talked about accommodations making things easier, and you actually mentioned a few things in your descriptions. So what are some other tips or tools that you can give, maybe to teachers, on how to make things a little bit more accessible?

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. The problem there is, I’m gonna give you a cop-out answer, okay? Not really, but a little bit. When I’m thinking about how to make things smooth with a team, I try to start by asking: What are y’all doing right now? How does instruction look for you and the students in your class? And also, how do you plan? What sorts of materials do you show? What are the students asked to do, and what are maybe the potential barriers to access? And from there, building a workflow backwards. In terms of: okay, you’re not using a textbook. Okay, cool. So then I can’t order that textbook in an accessible format. You’re making your own materials. Can we get ahead X number of days? Can you plan out X number of days in advance for me to be able to adapt the materials that you’re using?

There’s so many different ways to do things, but I will often do some sort of shared drive. And I will often have a scenario where a teacher can drop files into a folder of inaccessible documents—this is a Google Drive folder that is full of inaccessible documents that the student needs to be able to access. And then I will go in there, look at it, adapt it, and put it in a Google Drive folder that the student has access to, if they’re accessing their own materials. If not, I’ll put it in a folder that the teacher has access to, where they know this is the adapted versions of those. So I think identifying that workflow is really super important, because it could look different. ‘Cause some people might say, “I only use paper.” And it’s like, okay, cool. So then I’m gonna pick up the paper for the next three days, and then I’m gonna leave, and I’m gonna come back with it adapted. It’s all so individual.

Now, that said, there are a couple things that I do that make things a little easier. I can give you a couple of tips. Say that you’re using a book—maybe it’s a picture book—and you need a really quick version that is just text. You could download it from a database. There are databases like Bookshare where you can get Word documents of books for your students if you need to. But say it’s not there, ’cause it might not be there. One thing I’ve done in the past: I’ve gone to YouTube, and on my phone, I’ll open a note and start dictation. I will hit play. Sometimes I’ll have to slow the video down a bit so my phone catches all of it. And then when I stop dictation, I will have all the text that was read. I’ll also have every word that person said, right? But at least I didn’t have to retype the whole thing. Often what I’ll do is run it, pull that text out of my phone, throw it in a Word document on my computer, and play it again while reading it and taking out anything that’s wrong. I’ve done that.

Another thing that I do a lot in terms of getting accessible text is I will just screenshot it on a Mac and then use the text recognition built into Mac. Now, there’s lots of programs that you could buy. I try to use that first, ’cause that’s easiest, and a lot of us have that already readily available.

And then I’ve also been leveraging AI in a lot of ways—leveraging AI ethically, I should say, okay? AI has been really good at image descriptions. Say you have a picture of something. You throw it in AI, and you say, “This is a picture for an X-aged student with a visual impairment. Write an image description of this.” And the reason that I include the X age is, what I see so often in the world is image descriptions in, like, an Eric Carle book—a little kid’s book—where the image descriptions are profoundly higher than that age level. And that’s because the transcriber is doing their job, which is to transcribe and make the material accessible. Problem is, they’re not teachers sometimes. And so they’re making the pictures accessible, and they’re writing a flowing image description using words that the student doesn’t understand and cannot read. So I will do that often, and I’ll be like, “Okay, I need at least just a start to an image description.” Here’s AI—pull out an image description. And it’s often too long—I’ll often edit it down—but it’s better than having to do it from scratch. And I think using AI in those sorts of situations is really helpful to help with access.

Tim Villegas: Yes, that’s a great example, and it’s actually something that we do a lot. Before AI, we would just write one—

Jonathan Hooper: Do your best.

Tim Villegas: Right? Yeah. And as a lot of other people know, it’s not easy to write image descriptions. How long does it need to be? How descriptive does it need to be? And having those AI tools really helps, especially when we’re posting on social media, to be able to get the alt text and everything. And I love that idea about having it transcribe the YouTube video. That’s brilliant. So really good stuff.

Jonathan Hooper: Once, someone saw me in my office doing that—and I had been doing that for a long time, and I had not thought about it as being a thing I might wanna share with people. And someone saw me doing that, and they were like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Oh, I’m making an accessible version of this picture book.” And they were like, “Whoa.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I guess maybe I should share this with people.” ‘Cause it actually came from a student where they needed a book for next period. I did not have the time to write it. And so I was like, “What could I possibly do? Maybe I could do this.” And it worked, and so I’ve been using it ever since.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. And it’s also so much easier to make things accessible now with so many different tools, including AI and all that stuff. So yeah, definitely the excuses are becoming less and less relevant.

Any final thoughts? The majority of our listeners are educators, and ones that are deeply passionate and committed to inclusive practices. So when you’re thinking about inclusion, specifically for students with visual impairment, any things you wanna leave our audience with? Any thoughts?

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. I think often when we think about inclusion, we’re thinking about the academics and making those sorts of things accessible. And I think for me, inclusion means finding out what this person wants to be included in, right? And obviously the academics—they might not wanna be included in the academics, maybe. They might be like, “Eh.” But in addition to the academics, finding out what this person wants to be included in and finding ways to make them included in that.

I had a student who really wanted to take a dance class, and that’s very visual. And I worked with a dance teacher in the community to say, “Okay, this is how you can work with a person with a visual impairment.” And it’s being included in all things—in your field trips, when you go out to dinner, having an accessible menu. Being included in all things that you wanna be included in, and maybe some things that you might need to be nudged to be included in.

Like, I had a student once—I had taught the team how to turn on audio descriptions for movies, and the team asked the student, “Oh, should we turn on audio description?” And, to my fault, I had not told her what an audio description was, ’cause she was quite young. And she said, “No, I’m okay.” And she thought that meant the teacher sitting next to her and describing the picture. And so having inclusive experiences allows you to know what inclusion even can look like for you, and then you can advocate for what you want later.

And I should say, now that I’ve said the word “advocate”—’cause I don’t wanna say that word without giving a little asterisk—it’s our responsibility to provide access and inclusive settings without having a student need to advocate for themselves. I hear a lot about “Oh, the student can advocate for their needs,” and yada yada. That’s putting a lot of pressure on a young learner to advocate for their needs. So when I say advocate, it’s for when it does arise. It shouldn’t be the norm. But if a teacher’s playing a video, knowing that you could turn on audio descriptions gives you the background knowledge to know what to advocate for. So that’s a little caveat there, too. But I think in general, inclusion is, for me, really about being included not only in your academics, but also in the things that you wanna be included in.

Tim Villegas: Yeah. Where can people find out more about you and your role and your organization? Whatever you’d like to share with them.

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. So I have a website. It’s www.jonathantvi.com. That’s got a lot of information about me. People can reach out to me there. They can also reach out to—if you have a student with CVI and you want our support in any way, we can really do anything in terms of supporting teams and families. You can find us at the Children’s Home of Pittsburgh. It’s the Pediatric VIEW program, and we do all sorts of things. We have families—if you’re a parent and you’re hearing this—we have families that come here from all over the world and stay on site, and we’ll do a week-long assessment from us and PT, OT, speech, and really try to give you a roadmap to take back with you to your teams. But in addition to those things, we also have so much that we can do virtually, too.

Tim Villegas: That idea that inclusion means being part of all of the things that matter to you, not just the ones that show up on a report card, is a good place to land. Before we wrap up, there’s one more thing I wanna get to.

Amazing. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your time and your wisdom. Before I let you go, we have something called the mystery question. It’s not really that big of an oath. I have questions written on some note cards, and I pick one at random, and then we both answer the question.

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, okay.

Tim Villegas: Here we go. Here we go. Where we stop, nobody knows. What is your favorite piece of clothing that you own? And I don’t know—that’s my handwriting. What is this? So, favorite piece of clothing. Yes.

Jonathan Hooper: Oh my goodness, my favorite. I have a hoodie from a brand called Comfort. And it is, like, weighted.

Tim Villegas: Oh, really?

Jonathan Hooper: Yeah. I think it might have a special ed undertone to it, actually—like it might be for people who need that extra support. My Instagram’s full of special education stuff, so I was probably targeted. And as I’m saying this out loud to you right now, I’m thinking, “I wonder if I was targeted, if it were really supposed to be for my students.” But I wear it. I bought one, and I love it. It’s weighted, but not enough to really make it hard to move around in.

Tim Villegas: I love it. That is fascinating. I don’t have a weighted sweatshirt or anything like that, but we do have something. It’s like a Snuggie, but not really. It’s really big and thick, and it’s for when it’s really cold and stuff. I don’t know if that’s my favorite, though.

I’d say my favorite piece of clothing—gosh, it’s so hard. Actually, I’m not really known to be concerned about fashion. Not at all. My family looks really nice—they have really good fashion sense—and a T-shirt and jeans is what I dress in. But I’ll say, right now, it’s something I don’t wear very often ’cause I don’t want it to get dirty. I’m a Los Angeles Dodgers fan. I grew up in California in the LA area, and of course, when we’re recording, they’re in the playoffs. And so I have a custom jersey that has my last name on it. And I don’t wear it very often because I don’t want it to get dirty, ’cause it’s bright white. But I do love wearing it. In fact, I’ve been holding off from wearing it because I don’t want it to get… But I’m gonna wear it tonight. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna wear it tonight.

Jonathan Hooper: Okay, good. That’ll be something to look forward to.

Tim Villegas: Exactly.

Jonathan Hooper: Oh, that’s fun.

Tim Villegas: All right, Jonathan, thank you for indulging us with the mystery question. I’m going to sign us off, but don’t go anywhere.

Jonathan Hooper: Okay, cool. Got it.

Tim Villegas: Jonathan Hooper, thank you so much for being with us on the Think Inclusive podcast. We really appreciate your time.

Jonathan Hooper: Thank you.

Tim Villegas: That was Jonathan Hooper. Here’s what I’m taking with me. Vision is not the same as cognition. What looks like a student who doesn’t know something is often just a student who didn’t have access to the information. Jonathan told a story about a middle schooler who thought you bought toast at the grocery store, not because he couldn’t learn, but because nobody had narrated that moment. Lack of access, not lack of ability. That’s a distinction worth sitting with.

And his reframe on inclusion: it’s not just about academics, it’s about finding out what this person wants to be included in—the dance class, the lunch table, recess. That’s where belonging lives.

One practical step for educators: before your next IEP meeting or team conversation about a learner with a visual impairment, write down one assumption you might be making about what that student can or can’t do, and then ask whether that assumption is about ability or about access. Jonathan would say those are very different things.

Now, let’s roll the credits. Think Inclusive is brought to you by me, Tim Villegas. This show is a production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education with writing help from Claude, editing by Rey from theinternet, scheduling and production help from Jill Wagoner. Our original music is by Miles Kredich with extra vibes from Melod.ie.

Big thanks to our sponsors, IXL and Adaptiverse. Visit ixl.com/inclusive and adaptiverseapp.com. If you’ve made it this far, you’re officially part of the Think Inclusive Inclusion Crew. Want to help us keep moving the needle forward for inclusion? Head to mcie.org and click the donate button. Give 5, 10, $20. Any amount helps us keep partnering with schools and districts to move inclusive practices forward and support educators doing the work. Find us on the socials almost everywhere @thinkinclusive.

Thanks for hanging out, and remember, inclusion always works.