Making Physics Labs More Accessible

First of all, a clarification for those who are not aware of this. The term "accessible" as used here in the US within this context tends to refer to accessible to people with disabilities.

This is a report or maybe a White paper by a committee given the charge by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) to study how we can make physics labs in schools more accessible to students with various types of disabilities. I have read through it rather quickly, and I intend to read it some more when I have the chance (I've only stumbled upon it today).

Let me just say that for most physics college instructors, especially in Ph.D-granting institutions, there is very little training and awareness of the issue of accessibility of the physics courses that are taught, much less the consideration of making physics labs accessible to people with various types of disabilities. I myself was ignorant of such things until I decided to be trained as an online instructor during the COVID shutdown. It was during such training that the idea of accessibility and designing a Learning Management System (LMS) page and course material that are accessible came into my conscious awareness. So now, almost everything I post to the course's LMS page, and almost all the online material that I distribute tend to pass an accessibility evaluation, even when none of my students needed them to be.

However, those are the only things I'm capable of doing. I still struggle in trying to figure out how to make some of the more complicated figures, graphs, etc. to have the accurate alt-text to accompany them. I still am not sure how these document readers translate mathematical equations, and whether this is done accurately. And of course, the issue of how to make lab accessible to a student who can't see, can't hear, can't lift or grab something, can't walk, etc. goes way beyond my pay grade! This is not something that is easy to solve and most likely require department-wide or even institution-wide support and involvement. It will also involve quite a sizeable funding if we have to retrofit and install devices, software, etc. to existing physics lab equipment.

I'm not going to lie, I find this goal to be an exceedingly difficult task to accomplish. As an experimentalist by training, my philosophy for lab work is not just about the data-collection, but also the act of physical assembly of the equipment, following and understanding the instruction, problem-solving and making diagnostics when things don't seem to work as they should, and being creative at figuring out what causes what. I don't know how to accomplish all of this and still make the physics lab accessible to all students regardless of the type of disabilities that they have. The gist from the document that I referred to only gave superficial ideas and recommendations.

Maybe this is the lighting of the fire to start the pot to boil. I hope it is because I see a huge amount of problem-solving work to make the general physics lab more accessible and still manage to hit all the student learning goals.

Zz.