Blind students redefine ‘can do’
Disability Support Services helps level playing field for Rice pair

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Being blind hasn’t kept Katie Wang and Alysha Jeans from excelling at Rice, and there are many good reasons for that.

	JEFF FITLOW Blind students Katie Wang (left) and Alysha Jeans have benefited from resources provided by Rice’s Disability Support Services, which has translated reams of study materials into Braille and other formats.

For starters, they’re terrific students. When Wang graduates this week, she’ll walk through the Sallyport with degrees in psychology and statistics. And Jeans’ professors will gladly say she pulls more than her weight as she works toward a degree in electrical engineering.

But also, Rice has helped them excel by providing the materials they need through Disability Support Services (DSS), which supplies the two students and as many as 150 others whatever help they may require at any given time.

For these two, both blind since birth, DSS has translated reams of study materials into Braille and other formats, not only textbooks but also the kind of graphs, charts and equations essential to engineers and statisticians.

“I’ve talked to blind students at other universities who don’t get anything in Braille,” said Jeans, a Baker College senior who will graduate in 2010. “I have a friend who took a class in fall ’07 and didn’t get his books for it until fall ’08. That definitely has never happened to me at Rice.”

“We have a whole crew that could work almost 24/7 churning material out,” said Jean Ashmore, director of Rice’s DSS. “You should see what we do for electrical engineers. Dan (Starr, adaptive technology specialist) and his crew have done some creative diagram development.”

Katie Wang, accompanied by Disability Support Services director Jean Ashmore, will graduate this week with degrees in psychology and  statistics. JEFF FITLOW

“I’ve been really impressed with the services I’ve received at Rice,” said Wang, who will pursue a doctorate in social psychology at Yale. “I’d never been away from home before, so it was a new experience for me to live on campus and eat in the student dining halls and just interact with people in general.

“When I first got here, DSS got an orientation mobility instructor from the state Division for Blind Services to help show me how to get to the academic buildings I needed to use and around my residential college, Martel. It was challenging for the first couple of weeks, but I got used to it pretty quickly.” Rice appealed to her for “the personalized attention to undergraduates,” she said.

“I like small colleges. I like to be able to interact with my professors, to communicate with them about my needs,” said Wang, who was born in Taiwan and moved to Texas with her family as a teen.

Jeans said DSS goes the extra mile to make sure she has what she needs, from textbooks to circuitry diagrams made on a raised-line printer at Fondren Library. The Kansas native knows something about going the extra mile, having hiked in Peru, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and gone skydiving.

	JEFF FITLOW Alysha Jeans’ professors will gladly say she pulls more than her weight as she works toward a degree in electrical engineering.

Jeans is about to begin her second summer interning at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., where she expects to work on a laser system for Earth-to-spacecraft communication for future missions. “I think I want to stay in space sciences or something aerospace-related,” she said. “I think it would be really cool to work at JPL full-time, because I really like it there.”

Gary Woods, a professor in the practice of computer technology at Rice, recognizes his student’s talent. “Junior-level electrical engineering courses at Rice are challenging enough in their own right,” he said. “While the instructors and DDS provide Alysha with Braille copies of all the course material, she has to visualize the material and work without being able to make sketches or write out equations. The intellectual firepower it requires to accomplish that is just astonishing.”

Woods said he worked closely with DSS and tried to plan lectures far enough in advance to make sure Jeans had the right texts and slides. “But there’s a laboratory component to the course, and there were things she couldn’t do unaided in the lab — finding components and plugging them into breadboards, things like that.

“We did purchase an oscilloscope that has an audio output and is designed for blind people to enable her to understand the behavior of signals in the circuits being constructed.”

Woods said Jeans’ lab partners helped with the component assembly, “but Alysha fully carried her part of the work. She’s performing at a very high level.”

Wang’s accomplishments at Rice and Jeans’ ongoing journey please Ashmore, who helps students with deafness, orthopedic and physical limitations, chronic illnesses, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, psychiatric problems and other learning disabilities.

In every case, she and her staff provide highly personalized support to help students realize their potential, whatever their situation.