Meeting Individual Needs: Art, Accessibility, and Visual Impairments

Creating and responding to art is a visual experience. Understanding the impact that visual impairments have on a student’s ability to participate in making and engaging in art is vital. Visual impairments can range from low vision and color vision deficiencies to total vision loss. As an art teacher, you need to be cognizant of the obstacles students might encounter in the art classroom. Once you identify the obstacles, you can plan ways to provide scaffolding, modifications, and adaptations to ensure that students can successfully participate in your art lesson.

Adaptations for Low Vision
Low vision can affect a person’s ability in multiple ways, such as not being able not see clearly, a lack of contrast sensitivity that makes it difficult to distinguish value and similar colors, a lack of depth perception, and tunnel vision (the loss of peripheral vision).

Students with low vision may experience blurry vision, glare, or a blind spot. You can find out more about how to help your learners who have visual impairments by speaking with classroom teachers, vision experts, and paraprofessionals who can offer insights and strategies. Providing simple adaptations will enhance their learning experience.

Strategies:

Use textured surfaces for creating or add texture to media (e.g., cornmeal to paint).
Outline areas with a wide black line so students can see easily when painting or cutting.
Offer 6B pencils for drawing and thick shapes to trace, if appropriate.
Use fluorescent media, paints, markers, and papers.
Provide scented paints, markers, or modeling dough. (Explain to students that the cherry-scented medium is red, the banana-scented is yellow, etc.)
Enlarge the font on handouts and signage and use high contrast.

Adaptations for Visual Color Deficiency
Visual color deficiency (color blindness) can affect students’ perception of color, their art-making, and how they respond to works of art. Artists create and choose colors in tones as they are inspired by their subject. I have a student who struggles with colors that are close to each other, such as red and orange. Red/green deficiency is the most common form of color deficiency, and yellow/blue is seen less often. When students are observing works of art, students with visual color deficiency may not see or experience the artwork in the same way that their classmates do.

Strategies:

Look around your room and think about remaking signage, handouts, art room rules, etc., with higher contrast and larger fonts.
During art discussions, offer students textured items to aid in comprehension of the discussion (e.g., soft fabrics for a billowing curtain in an Edward Hopper painting).
Offer textured surfaces to create with or textured drawing plates.
Select pieces from artists like Bridget Riley, Roy Lichtenstein, and Keith Haring that emphasize strong contrast and bold, clean lines.

Adaptations for Near or Total Vision Loss
Blindness refers to complete or near total vision loss. Students with blindness may create from their memory or by using what vision they have, which may consist of vague shapes and tones. Creating by touch, smell, and sound also assists students who are blind. Allowing students to work through their other senses will help them in the creative process. Stimulate ideas by offering tactile objects for students to explore. Using a 3D printer to make small three-dimensional or low-relief copies of artwork can aid students in visualizing and analyzing them.

Strategies:

Enlist a clever storyteller to describe what an artwork looks like.
Allow students to create with tactile media in low relief or in 3D.
By way of touch, show students where supplies are on the table; you could put specific materials in different shaped containers (e.g., use a round bin for brushes).
When working on a flat surface, tape the paper down and put a mat around it so students can feel the boundaries of the shape.
Create labels in braille by using an online program and a 3D printer.

Conclusion
As you encounter students with visual impairments, think about the lesson you are planning and then put yourself in their shoes. How will their impairment affect their participation? What can I do to make it more accessible? Should I enlarge the reproduction or worksheet? Could I offer shapes with raised edges to trace or a low-relief object? Consider possible roadblocks and create adaptations before class begins.
Remember to add some SASS to your lessons. Think of a STRATEGY, create your ADAPTATION, keep it SIMPLE, and SAVE it with your lesson.