[Athen] Helping a blind student survive physical anthropology

[Deborah Armstrong via athen-list]

When she started college she was low-vision but now my student is almost completely blind.
Though she's a liberal arts major she's required to take at least one science course.
We've had this problem forever; absolutely none of our science courses are accessible. They all have labs which sometimes involve working with computer simulations, and often involve measuring, pouring, looking through a microscope etc.
My suggestion has always been that the blind student works with a partner and operates as the note-taker and the person who researches the science, while the lab partner performs the physical parts of the experiment. The partner can also say if a solution changes color while the blind student can be the one who knows what the color changing signifies. This seems quite reasonable to me and that's how blind friends in the past have coped with Anthropology, biology, geology, chemistry and even meteorology labs.
But this professor requires students work alone believing that lab partners encourage cheating. This is not the first time we've had this problem and I keep being asked for another solution. We don't typically hire assistants to help students; there's nothing in our budget for that.
I told the counselor who is panicking that we also have students with sight but physical limitations that also prevent them from performing alone in science labs and she needs to consult with the department chair for a permanent solution. But I'm a paraprofessional; consulting with the department chair would be a violation of my personal role at the college.
So I'm asking the list. What have you done when this situation crops up?
And why in the heck cannot there be at least one fully accessible science course for those who have no intent to make science a major? I keep reading about all sorts of grants schools get to encourage participation in STEM for blind and visually impaired students but it's always for a particular high school or community college, or worse yet a school for the blind, and it's not applicable to anyone outside the little "test" group. someone really needs to get a grant to create a fully online mooc-style course that any disabled student who needs to fulfill a science requirement can enroll in.
--Debee

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