Just read it again

First year. A Tuesday, first period, Geography.

A page is handed out. It is a photocopy of a page from a book — nine sentences, a diagram of a river at the bottom, six questions underneath. Twelve minutes to read it and answer the first three.

He reads the first sentence. By the time he reaches the end of it he has lost the beginning, so he reads it again. The third time it holds. There are eight sentences left.

At minute eight he is on sentence five. The girl beside him is writing the answer to question two.

The teacher comes round, sees the empty lines, and says the kind and obvious thing.

“Read it again, and then have a go.”

She is not being lazy or unkind. She has twenty-eight students, four minutes left in that part of the lesson, and nothing else to offer him. Read it again is the only tool the design put in her hand.

The same door, one more time

Here is what that instruction actually contains. It offers him the same door, a second time. It does not open it, widen it, or go round it. Nobody would stand at a locked door and be told to try it again, harder — and yet that is the shape of the advice, and we give it several times a day, in a warm voice, meaning well.

Now follow his Tuesday.

Third period, History: a source to read, then say what it tells us. Fourth period, Science: a method on the board and a worksheet to work through. Lunchtime: a notice about the bus. Sixth period, Maths: a word problem — a train leaves a station. Then home, where the journal has to be read before the homework in it can be started, and three pages of the textbook after that.

By half three he has been asked to read, in order to do something that was not reading, more times than anybody counted. Nobody counted because nobody in any of those rooms was teaching reading. They were teaching rivers, evidence, method, and a train leaving a station.

In every subject but English, reading is not the skill being taught. It is the turnstile at the door. And we charge the same children at that turnstile, in every room, all day.

Nobody chose a scan

The page was a photocopy for perfectly good reasons. The textbook is heavy and half the class has not brought it. Or the best explanation of river erosion she has ever found is in a book that went out of print in 2004. Or the department has one set of texts and four classes. A photocopier was in the building before any accessible file was, so a photocopy is what a good teacher reaches for when she wants twenty-eight people looking at the same words.

I have done it. I have run a photocopy of a photocopy, still warm, and put it into a child’s hand and asked him to read it. I did not think of it as a locked door. I thought of it as a page.

But a scan is a photograph of words, and a photograph of words cannot be read aloud by anything. Not by his phone, not by the laptop, not by any of the tools a family may have bought themselves. Every piece of assistive technology in that room was defeated, silently, by the choice of paper over file. Nobody told us that. It is not in any circular I have read.

What listening actually is

Offering the same content as audio is not a favour, and it is not an easier version. It is the identical text with the decoding lifted out of the way, so that the thing you are actually teaching arrives.

This is the plainest idea in Universal Design for Learning — CAST call it multiple means of representation — and it is the one most often mistaken for charity. It is not charity. It is the recognition that the content and the route to the content are two different things, and that we have been quietly treating one route as the content itself.

We say: change the environment, not the child. A page is an environment.

And listening is not only for him. It is for the girl who decodes beautifully and understands far more when she hears it. For the student whose English is four months old. For the one who takes it in on the bus with headphones. For his mother, who would like to know what he is doing this term and cannot sit down at nine in the evening to read three pages of it.

What the turnstile costs

Him. All day, in rooms that are not teaching reading, he is being assessed on reading. He learns something entirely false and perfectly logical: I’m not able for History. He is very able for History. He cannot yet get into the room where it is.

The teacher. She gets a blank page back, which tells her nothing. She cannot tell whether he did not understand the river or never reached it. The one piece of information she needs is the one the design removed.

His mother. Two hours at the table, reading it aloud to him, sentence by sentence, because it works. She has become the accommodation — unfunded, unrecorded, and completely invisible to the school, which sees only that the homework was done.

The record. Words start to appear. Reluctant reader. Doesn’t engage with text. They are words about willingness, attached to a problem about access, and they will follow him for years.

What a designed version looks like

Almost none of this costs money.

Use the file, not the photograph of the file. If the page exists digitally, give out the digital one. If it must be scanned, run it through optical character recognition — most scanners and free tools do it now. The test takes two seconds: can you select a single word with your finger? If not, nothing can read it.

Offer audio for everything, to everyone, as standard. Not arranged for him, in advance, by his mother, on the strength of a report. A read-aloud button on the page. The publisher’s own audio where it exists. The reader that is already built into every phone and laptop in the building. Nothing is an accommodation once everybody has it.

Say out loud that listening counts. The instruction is not “read pages 40 to 43.” It is “know what is on pages 40 to 43 by Thursday — read it, listen to it, or both.” One sentence, and it reclassifies half the class.

Separate the two jobs on the page. If the question is about rivers, do not let the question itself be a reading test. One idea per sentence, the diagram labelled, the important words in the question and not buried in clause four.

Read the source aloud once, to the room. Forty seconds. The cheapest item on this list and the one that reaches everybody in it.

And the one that does cost: teach him to read. Properly, by someone who knows how, in time set aside for it.

What this is not

Audio is not literacy teaching. It does not teach him to read, and it must never become the reason we quietly stop trying. It is what stops him losing History while he learns to.

It must not lower what is asked of him either. Same text, same questions, same standard — a different door. If a school ever uses “he has the audio” as a reason to expect less, we will have taken an access route and turned it into a lower track, which is the oldest trick in the system’s book.

And it does not replace a reading recovery programme, a special education teaching allocation, a speech and language therapist, or the assessment he is still waiting for. Good design does not conjure resources. It stops us wasting the ones we have on a barrier we put there ourselves.

He did not need the page again.

He needed a way in that was not the page.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.