Making chemistry safe and accessible to all is our top priority at UC Davis. Blind chemistry students need equal access in the laboratory and best practices must be taken into account to ensure a safe and productive working environment for everyone in the laboratory. We will use blindness as a lens to discuss making laboratory work accessible, safe, and enjoyable for students with disabilities by working with an assistant. Proper disabled student-assistant etiquette will be addressed and we will provide our best practices for working under the guidance of an assistant in a rigorous wet laboratory setting. We will provide preliminary results from a high school course we instructed to sighted students which trained them to be excellent assistants to the blind. Finally, our update on making a computational organic chemistry laboratory completely accessible to a blind graduate student including our most recent advancement of 3-dimensional printing with braille labels will be discussed.

Importance of complete accessibility and independence in the laboratory

248th National Meeting (2014)

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