American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue on Technology EXPLORING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Education for Blind Students
by Justin Salisbury
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From the Editor: Justin Salisbury is a graduate student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. He has taught cane travel, Braille, home management, and classes on NFB philosophy at residential and nonresidential training centers for the blind. He works to bring the knowledge of the National Federation of the Blind into research, policy, and university training spaces.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often perceived as a threat to the integrity of education, but it also can be our friend in educational settings. In this piece I hope to show that AI can be used positively to generate ideas and do a lot of our cumbersome searching and sifting.
When teachers need ideas, we sometimes talk to classmates and colleagues throughout our networks. These exchanges extend our team and enrich the soil where we can grow and harvest ideas. AI can expand our networks to include many more people than we, as individuals, could ever get to know. We cannot search through millions of books and articles, but AI can do so in seconds. AI can draw ideas from countless sources. I do not claim that AI is the same as human creativity, but it can help us gather information and ideas for our creative endeavors.
I cannot claim that I alone generated all of the ideas I include in this article. Some of them came from fellow teachers I met as classmates, instructors, and alumni from Louisiana Tech University, where I earned my teaching credentials for the blindness field. Louisiana Tech gave me a strong foundation in the ways of thinking that led me to write this article.
Being a teacher can be challenging. We are often spread thin, with many things going on at once. Some of us are better than others at handling our workload. I am often in awe when I see that some teachers can juggle a lot more than I can and still manage to stay focused. Yet I know I can be a good teacher, even though I cannot juggle my entire workload as well as some others can. We all have different things on our plates, and sometimes a teacher can benefit from a little help. Seeking help is not cheating or cutting corners. It is simply a matter of using technology to help us become more productive.
I believe that AI can be used to enhance instruction in many subject areas, but I will focus on Braille instruction first. When students are learning to read, it is essential that they feel joy when they are reading. AI can help us generate stories that our students can read about topics that bring them joy. We ask AI to tell us a story about a certain topic and set a word length. We can also tell AI the reading level we want for the story.
Making sure to match the story to the student’s reading level can be very helpful. We can tell AI, “Give me a story about women’s professional basketball. Make it about three hundred words long and at a fifth-grade reading level.”
Perhaps our student does not know the entire Braille code yet. We can look through the text of the story that AI generated and check for contractions that the student doesn’t know. Then we can tell the AI system to revise the story so that it no longer includes the unfamiliar contractions. We also could go the other way; if there is a symbol that the student is about to learn, we may want to create a story that uses that symbol many times. Some teachers are creative and artistic enough to make up such stories themselves on the spot. For the rest of us who are not Walt Disney, AI can be a great tool to expand the possibilities of what we can do when we teach.
In home economics or home management classes, we could use AI to help us create ideas for meal preparation, based on dietary restrictions or limited ingredients. We could ask AI to tell us what dishes we could make with the ingredients we have on our shelves. There is still a human process involved in verifying whether we have the right amounts of each ingredient and whether the ingredients are in good condition. There is still an opportunity to choose which dishes we want to prepare. That choice can be informed by any number of wants, needs, or outside conditions. If we just had pizza yesterday, we may not want it again today, even if AI points out that it is an option. If we want to prepare a meal for a group of people, and we gather a list of everyone’s dietary restrictions, we could use AI to help us generate ideas for a meal that does not violate anyone’s allergies or ethical and religious requirements.
AI can also enhance instruction in access technology. Consider a student who is simultaneously working on their skills for editing Word documents and learning about résumé preparation. We could ask AI to generate a document with errors for the student to find. For example: we might tell AI, “Create me a résumé in a Word document that contains X, Y, and Z errors.” Have the student find those errors. It is even better when you ask AI to create errors that spell check won’t find. For example, you can ask AI to include words such as choose that you can change to chose to create an editing error. Make the résumé specific to the career field that the student plans to enter.
For a class or discussion on NFB philosophy, consider telling AI to generate a motivational speech for a blind person to deliver. You could narrow your request to a subset of blind people, such as blind students of the same age as your students. Listen to or read the speech together and pick apart the ideas that AI expressed. Why did it think we would need to hear Point A or Point B? Is AI’s reasoning actually inspirational?
The President of the National Federation of the Blind, Mark Riccobono, recently created a system called Mark AI. Mark AI allows people to engage with an AI system to learn about the stories and collective lived experience of the organized blind. It may be able to share stories about specific types of situations that blind people have shared, and these could become great conversation starters. If a blind student wants to be an electrician, maybe we could have the student ask Mark AI for stories of blind people who have become electricians, including the challenges that they have faced and the strategies that have helped them succeed. I do not know whether Mark AI is there yet, but the concept is certainly realistic for AI in the near future.
We can and should teach students to use AI as well. When students need to learn to advocate for themselves, they could use AI to generate arguments for or against their position. Interacting with AI could help them practice and prepare for an important self-advocacy negotiation. For example, we could give AI the following prompts:
- Tell me what arguments a theme park employee might use to try to prevent blind people from riding a roller coaster.
- Tell me what arguments a standardized testing company might use to try to deny a blind student the opportunity to test with a paper Braille copy of the exam.
- Tell me what arguments might be used to try to deny a blind student the opportunity to participate in a woodworking class in a high school.
- Tell me what questions a hiring manager in a doughnut shop might ask a blind high school student who is applying for a job there.
I relate to the common fears about the changes AI can bring to our society. I think many of those fears are legitimate. AI may displace workers from their jobs, and it can be misused by students who want a shortcut to complete assignments. But since AI is here, I am doing my best to learn how to approach it, to see how we can make it work for us. In the National Federation of the Blind, we are doing our best to ensure that AI is working for us. We can use AI to process the kinds of information that it can handle, and then we can focus on bringing our humanity and our understanding of blindness to do the rest.
We still need humans to deliver the holistic educational services that empower blind students, but we can delegate certain tasks to AI. Teachers, students, friends, and families all can benefit from AI, and AI can help make instruction for blind students even better.