In the new Speech & Debate class at Northwood, there is never an idle moment. Students spend every day mastering new techniques of public speaking or developing speeches that they will present the next week. Amongst this hurried activity, the students are frequently found writing. They draft outlines, record their cue cards and jot down peer reviews of their speeches.
At least, that is the case for all except one student in the class. Junior Katharine Barry, who goes by Adia, doesn’t record her speech notes or peer feedback because she can’t. She is legally blind.
Barry is a new arrival at Northwood, having previously attended Carrboro High School in Carrboro and Carolina Friends School in Durham. Barry has been legally blind since birth and is unable to make out text without a high level of magnification. In class, she utilizes a combination of a tablet computer and Braille machine in the place of pencils, pens and paper.
“It didn’t affect me too much when I was little,” Barry said. “In elementary school I read with magnifiers, then when I was eight or nine I started to learn Braille and walk with a long white cane.”
Outside of school, Barry plays goalball, a sport designed specifically for the visually impaired. In goalball, players use sound and touch to orient themselves on the field and to aim their shots at the opponent’s goal.
Barry’s teacher and several classmates agree that she is competent academically and well adjusted to her impairment.
“She’s an excellent student,” junior Graham Cleven said. “Clearly very intelligent, and she’s a fine speaker. She’s an excellent memorizer; she memorizes things really quickly, which is very cool. It’s a skill that a lot of us haven’t developed.”
Though some might think that Barry would be on a more level playing field in a class focused on speaking, there is still an abundance of written material. This helps most students, but it can actually hinder Barry in her classwork.
“That has been very difficult, because although it’s a verbal class, you would think that would lend itself to being an easier venue for Adia,” English and Speech & Debate teacher Jill Bone said. “But what’s happening is that so much of the initial instruction is online or is in paper copy or group work. She has to listen, because she can’t read, and then she has to do the group application but doesn’t always have the background that the other kids do. I send her the lesson material ahead of time. Whether she prepares the material ahead of time is up to her.”
While Barry finds reading to be a slow, time-consuming process, it is not as difficult as some other aspects of school. She is currently taking both Honors English III and Honors Precalculus.
“Usually classes like English [are easiest],” Barry said. “It’s just reading and writing essays, and I can pretty easily do that on a computer, where other students just use a book or normal writing it down. But math is hardest, because there’s a lot of stuff on the board and I need to get cameras to follow it. And it’s hard to make graphs in math so that I can see them.”
Barry also frequently has difficulties with completing her homework.
“It takes me longer to do my homework than it would for anyone else,” Barry said. “My family will help read textbooks or draw out charts bigger for me.”
Barry says that the greatest obstacle to her performance in Speech & Debate is the fact that she is unable to use written notes or prompts during her speeches.
“If you need to remember a long speech, you’d have to write it down on a series of note cards or on a teleprompter,” Barry said. “Right now, I’m working on a Braille display, so that’s harder to go along with my speech.”
A Braille display is a device that attaches to a computer or tablet and displays
words in Braille by raising bumps from its surface. However, the fact that these projections must be raised and lowered by pins in the device to display new letters limits Barry’s reading speed to just 70 words per minute, much slower than the usual rate at which people speak.
“She’s working on this new Braille machine; the problem is that the technology, the learning curve for anything that would help her, there’s nobody here to guide her with that, and I don’t know a thing about it,” said Bone. “So the burden… the responsibility for that becomes hers. It’s a tricky thing, this special equipment…. I think that she would be better served being trained with this equipment before she takes her classes, and then she would have a far better experience.”
Barry herself disagreed with this, saying that she did not need any other help with her learning in Speech & Debate or her other classes. She thought that the school has provided all the essentials and more assistance would be unnecessary.
“It’s just hard the first couple weeks of school knowing what to get and then trying to figure it all out,” Barry said. “The refreshable Braille display is complicated, since I am still learning how to use it, but it will be useful for longer speeches.”
On the whole, Barry has been able to adapt to Northwood and fit into her new classes. The many challenges that accompany the process of transitioning to a new school are greater for someone with a disability like hers, and who is not used to attending schools as large as Northwood, but Barry has started becoming another member of the Northwood student body.
“It’s been a pleasure teaching Adia, because it’s helped me think outside the box a little bit more, and that’s what the entire class is,” Bone said.
– By Colin Battis