Taylor – Data Driven Persona

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3/4 portrait of a black individual with shoulder length dreadlocks. dark brown eyes, and small earrings, wearing a cream colored suit jacket and a blue buttoned shirt featuring well spaced red vertical lines and white horizontal lines, looking at the camera with their arms crossed on their chest.Age: 36 years old
Work: Graphic designer for a marketing company specialized in social media communication
Major: MBA (part-time student)
Family: Married with two hearing children
Challenge: Deaf and fluent ASL speaker, school/work/life balance
Location: Waterville, ME
Where is home? New England
Pronouns: She/they
Accessibility accommodations: Video phone, ASL interpreter

A bit about her:

Taylor was born and raised in Massachusetts and moved to Maine shortly after graduation to work as a graphic designer in Portland, ME where she met her partner. Both Taylor’s and her wife’s families live far away and it can be difficult for them to find childcare without advance notice, which has proven to be a challenge at times to attend some of the networking and professional development events organized in some of their classes. Taylor is working towards an MBA to advance their career.

What are their frustrations so far?

“In one of my classes, all the content is online in writing, and I am often confronted with walls of text and nothing to break them down. This makes it hard for me to do the reading since ASL is so different from English.”

“Sometimes it feels like my program doesn’t care about less traditional students. Lots of the networking opportunities happen outside of class time when I need to care for my family and I cannot always find a babysitter, especially on short notice.”

“One of my professors often speaks with their hand covering their mouth and it affects how well Zoom captions what he is saying. It’s really annoying when this happens and I don’t have an ASL interpreter with me.”

“When we work in groups, students in my group often talk to my ASL interpreter when they want to talk to me, instead of addressing me directly.”

Five teaching strategies focused on digital equity that will help Taylor succeed:

  1. Provide accurate closed captions for all recorded audio and video course material
  2. Provide transcripts of lectures
  3. Schedule events that happen outside of class time ahead of time so students can make arrangements
  4. Facilitate the pace of the class session to provide time for the ASL interpreter to accurately communicate with the student
  5. Use clear and precise headings to help break down the course content (consult our tutorial on headings)

Many more students can benefit from these teaching strategies. Learn more about who benefits from these strategies. 

What has helped Taylor feel included in the UMaine community?

“Events where I don’t have to make a special request to have closed captions because I know they will be available to me.”

“In one of my classes, we can send questions to guest speakers in advance of their talk. It makes it easy for me to participate.”

“In another one of my classes, the professor asked that everyone who records a video response in the discussion board also corrects the captions of their video before they post it to the course, and everybody is doing it!”

Learn more…

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