Higher Education’s Sight Equity Crisis, and Its Solution

By Nicholas Stix

There is a crisis in academia: The non-sighted are naturally outraged that the sighted have advantages over them. There is no rational explanation or justification for why some people should have any advantage over anyone else, yet these inexcusable inequities persist.

Education Department Clarifies E-Reader Accessibility Rules
May 26, 2011, 2:23 pm
By Ben Wieder

The U.S. Department of Education today released a new guide to laws and rules colleges must follow to ensure e-reading devices and other emerging technologies are accessible to all students. It focuses on students with vision problems, a group whose access issues have triggered official complaints against colleges. The document, in the form of “Frequently Asked Questions,” was published in response to the department’s “Dear Colleague” letter to college presidents on the subject last June.
If colleges use e-readers, or other emerging technologies, blind students “must be afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students,” according to the department.

Clearly, the only equitable solution is for the federal government to create an even playing field, equalizing conditions between students who are presently blind, and those who are as yet non-blind.

And I know just the man for the job: Timayo Sharraud Knight. Mr. Knight could level the playing field via his patented, low-cost, spoonectomy technique.