Teaching journalism by a visually impaired instructor: positive attitudes, assistive technologies, and melting strategies

ABSTRACT

Journalism, as other academic disciplines that require normal vision, is considered difficult for visually impaired students to pursue. However, the involvement of visually impaired people in teaching journalism at university level is even more difficult. Although the experiences of visually impaired journalists and journalism students are well-documented in academia, no article about visually impaired people as educators of journalism is written. Drawing on the real experience of the author, a visually impaired lecturer of journalism, this article presents the key takeaways from teaching journalism to Egyptian sighted students. This article has many significant practical contributions, that is, (1) Introducing the tools and strategies that academics with visual impairments use to teach journalism, (2) Identifying the major difficulties encountered by lecturers with visual impairments who teach journalism, and (3) Motivating journalism schools to hire visually impaired educators. The article indicates that positive attitudes toward visually impaired educators as well as assistive technology devices help them to celebrate their disability and be ‘melted’ in society as normal. The article thus sheds light on an area of research that has not been examined before. The author’s insights are interpreted through the lens of critical disability studies. The article concludes with recommendations for increasing the number of journalism educators with visual impairments.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• teaching
• visually impaired
• blind
• instructors
• Egypt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Law No. 10 of 2018 on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Egypt.

2 Visually impaired people work at four newspapers in Egypt (Abdel Fattah 2019).

3 The screen reader is a software program that allows blind or visually impaired users to read the text that is displayed on the computer screen with a speech synthesizer or braille display (AFB n.d.).

4 The braille display provides access to information on a computer screen by electronically raising and lowering different combinations of pins in braille cells (AFB n.d.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ibrahim H. Emara

Ibrahim H. Emara is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Faculty of Arts-Tanta University in Egypt and a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at The School of Communication at American University. He holds both MA and PhD degreesin Mass Media from the Faculty of Mass Communication-Cairo University, and he is the first visually impaired person in Egypt to teach and conduct research in journalism. For over ten years, he taught several undergraduate classes, including Media Theories, Journalism History, Newspaper Layout, Newspaper Editing, and Media Translation. From 2016 to 2018, he was awarded a national scholarship to conduct research at The Hussman School of Journalism and Media at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Dr. Emara's research focuses on the use of mass media among people with visual impairment. His master's thesis and PhD is pioneering academic work that examines the newspapers created for blind people, which he named Braille journalism. Braille journalism was also featured in his article published in the Journal of Global Communication in 2017 as well as many media and communication conferences including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Mapping the Magazine, and The Popular Culture Association, to name a few. In Egypt, he was selected to participate in The Presidential Leadership Program (PLP) in 2015, which is the nation's top preparation course in management and public policy. Also, he authored several articles on Al-Ahram, Egypt's leading national daily newspaper. The core mission of his articles was to defend the rights of people with disability with the aim of achieving equality, inclusion, and accessibility. Currently, Dr. Emara is interested in investigating the use of new media by visually impaired activists using computational methods.