Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics are for Blind People Too!

From the Editor: As I write biographies for our leaders and consider my own education, I'm saddened by how much energy we too often have put into avoiding science and math courses. Sometimes it was because we were told these fields were beyond us, and enforcing this was the difficulty in getting the books used by sighted STEM students. But the beauty of this is that the world is changing, and blind people are beginning to demonstrate that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are not beyond us and that many of us can flourish in jobs that result from this education. Part of this positive change is that the National Federation of the Blind has run a program called STEM2U, encouraging education and work in these fields for nearly two decades. Traditionally we have brought students to our Jernigan Institute for training, and now we are expanding this work to our affiliates.

These pictures show some of the activities that demonstrate the nonvisual alternative techniques we use to make what are normally visual observations: