'The examiners thought she was deaf, not blind': The exam struggles of visually impaired students
Maya Kositck, who has some limited vision, requires modified exam papers. Photo: Gareth Chaney
Imagine if the powers that be in education wanted to save money, so they decided to cut the size of Leaving Cert exam papers and cram every question and comprehension into a single A4 page.
Knowing that you couldn’t read this, they tell you ‘We’re sorry but we’ll get someone to read the questions out for you instead’. Then, you are given an extra 10 minutes in Irish, English, history and geography, and up to 30 minutes extra in every other subject.
How well would you fare?
That’s how Eithne Walsh describes the situation faced by blind and visually impaired students when they sit State exams.
Eithne, a mother of three children, two of whom have visual impairments, is the communications officer with Féach, which supports parents of blind and vision impaired students.
The advocacy group has been raising concerns and highlighting the situation faced by students when it comes to accessing Ireland’s “ad-hoc” and poorly modified exam papers, as well as what it describes as a severe shortfall in the additional time allocated to students.
The State Examinations Commission (SEC) provides a scheme of Reasonable Accommodations at the Certificate Examinations (RACE Scheme) to support students with a complex variety of special educational needs.
The SEC is currently reviewing its set-up for visually impaired students as part of a wider review of the overall RACE scheme. Its also reviewing the accommodations for visually impaired students with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) following an invite from the human rights watchdog.
Over the last 10 years exams have become much more visual, Eithne explained. “If you look at exams now, you’ll see there’s the question, there’s a picture. There might be a little star with a word in it.
In other jurisdictions, including Northern Ireland, all this ‘visual clutter’ would be removed from an exam paper.
“How they modify papers here, they tend to take the paper for the fully sighted, take out some pictures, and they don’t modify it in any other way. It's not really modified at all. A lot of things have improved in education, but the papers are way back 20 years ago, from before people were accessing education digitally.”
Mother Aoife Kearney, Dublin 7, agrees. She has had several legal battles with the SEC on behalf of her daughter Maya who completed her Junior Cycle exams last year. “We won some success only through the courts but there were still some mess-ups on their part,” Aoife explained.
Maya, who has some limited vision, requires modified exam papers. However, despite securing a number of accommodations for her Junior Cycle exams, she still encountered issues particularly in her listening exam.
“The examiners thought she was deaf, not blind.”
Aoife has already started preparing for Leaving Cert exam accommodations. “I know they have lots of different accommodations for different kids, but it's all very generic. Even the letter you get, it contradicts itself and there are paragraphs cut and pasted for each accommodation.”
“Maya does things as independently as possible but she tries to find the most efficient way of doing it in the short time she has.”
Maya sits State exams in a separate centre from her peers, with an examiner to supervise as well as a reader. “We even had to fight to get two papers, you used to get one paper and you had to pass it back and forth.”
“The reader is there for when she gets tired and when things get blurry and she really can’t read at all. Most of the time, the idea is that she can pinch and zoom [in on digital papers] and she’ll get a PDF of a paper, and she’ll zoom in and read it.
"That’s how she likes working, she doesn’t like to rely on a reader but after a few hours her vision goes completely. They aren’t allowed help her obviously, she has to tell them what to read out, but that does take more time.”
However, the current set-up for extra time is a major issue, she believes. Under the RACE scheme, students are granted 10 additional minutes when it comes to Irish, English, history and geography, and 10 extra minutes per scheduled hour to a maximum of 30 minutes per exam in all other subjects.
Aoife said: “It takes her double the time to read than other children, yet they are giving her 10 extra minutes per exam. In the UK, they get up to 200% extra time, most students get 100% and they even reschedule the exams because they can’t fit all the extra time in the exam timetable.”
“They can space out their exams and do their exams over a longer period. They completely individualise the process in a way.”
In Northern Ireland, its recognised that vision impairments commonly affect an individual's speed of information processing, which may be unrelated to their cognitive ability.
As a result, it may take a student longer to read the text or to have it read to them and students may be granted up to 100% extra time for exams involving large amounts of text or complex diagrams when “sufficient evidence” of need is presented.
Ireland’s approach to modified papers is also very poor, Aoife pointed out.
“It's very ad hoc and they won’t allow image descriptions. The reader is allowed to read out the text [for a student], but the reader is not allowed to tell students what’s in the picture, even if it's not giving them the answer."
"In the UK, they’ll provide an image description for a reader to read out.”
A spokesman for the SEC said it is “acutely aware” of the needs of vision impaired candidates taking their examinations and works closely with the Visiting Teacher Service of the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) in providing accommodations.
“Examination papers are modified each year on demand based on the subject specific needs of candidates with vision impairments taking examinations in that year. Therefore, modified versions may not exist of all of the SEC’s examination papers.”
An “extensive” range of modified past papers and marking schemes are available from the NCSE Visiting Teachers working with vision impaired candidates or directly from the RACE of the SEC, he added.
“At this time, we have been working with our internet service provider to have these resources available on our website in line with our examination paper publication protocols and this service will be launched in the first quarter of 2025.”
"The SEC is currently reviewing the reasonable accommodations and the concerns expressed by stakeholders, including vision impaired candidates and their families, will be considered as part of that review," he added.
