According to Dr. Fredrick K. Schroeder, President of the World Blind Union, over 98 percent of the disabled in the world do not receive any education. We are very fortunate in this country that even the disabled have an opportunity to be educated. In order to get the most from the educational opportunities, low-vision and blind students must be able to effectively take notes and read them back for study. The way a specific person chooses to take notes is personal. Below, is a list of options for anyone with a vision impairment to record information for later retrieval.

 

Why is how you take notes so personal?

The system that someone uses to record information is a personal choice. Below are a few of those options that I have utilized at some point over the years and I hope my ideas will improve your odds of getting the education you are entitled to.

 

How do people who have some useable vision take notes?

During my elementary and high school years, I had a lot of residual vision for someone who was legally blind. My choice for taking notes was to use my remaining vision. I took notes using a large yellow notepad and wrote with a very large tipped black marker. What made this mode of note taking work for me was that the contrast between the paper and the words was enough for me to make out the information.

 

What also appealed to me was that my classmates also used pens and paper and I really wanted to blend in with them.

 

As I lost useable vision, I switched over to recording my notes and lectures. At that time, small tape recorders were available and that is how I took notes. That is also the method I used for reading my books. My texts would come to me on tape where someone had read the book aloud. My bedroom at home had hundreds of cassette tapes stacked everywhere from all the classes I attended.

 

Today, technology has improved so that those hundreds of hours of cassette recordings could be stored on a single digital recorder. A drawback to using audio recordings for taking notes is that in order to find the important parts later, you had to listen to the whole recording multiple times to find what you wanted. You could speed up the playback. However, that still took a lot of time.

 

When I got to college, portable talking computers were available and pretty affordable. This was the best of all worlds. I only needed to write down the parts of the lecture I needed to know. In addition, my peers also used laptops and I didn’t standout so much. Other than the expense of the laptop, this method worked well for me.

 

How to take notes in the workplace?

Now that I have left school and am in the working world, the need to take notes is still around. I had no idea in class how much time the ‘real world’ spent in meetings.

 

Well, during those meetings, I take notes just like in class. However, the method I use now is by using a Braille notetaker. It is basically a stripped-down PC with a Braille keyboard for data entry. I am not only able to take notes, I can edit them and actually share them with others.

 

How you take notes is a personal choice

As my vision changed along with changes in technology, I modified how I took notes so that it worked for me    . It is essential that everyone be able to record information and then to retrieve it when it is needed. Everyone needs to be able to take notes in school, take notes at work, and even make personal lists. How someone decides to take notes is not important. What is important is that it works.

 

Need a great motivational speaker for your next event?

I am now scheduling speaking engagements for the last half of the year. In addition to this blog and my videos, I frequently speak to universities, at conferences, about overcoming obstacles and seeing options.

 

If you know someone who I should connect with, a boss or an event planner, someone who is looking for a public speaker for their events, have them email me at John@JohnBaileySpeaker.com.

 

You can learn a whole lot more by visiting my speaking page at JohnBaileySpeaker.com.