“We’re reconstructing history here.”
A new piece by the Berkeley News profiles William Carter, Geography Ph.D. candidate, on his innovative research methods and advocacy for neurodiverse students. Carter studies centuries-old slave ship logs whose text was scrawled in nearly indecipherable cursive. The logs are especially inaccessible to Carter, who has dyslexia and whose screen reader tools for written notes and published books didn’t work on 400-year-old slave ship logs. In collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students’ Program (DSP), Carter created a first-of-its-kind research solution to allow him to read these centuries-old materials. Logs are translated into digital text, which Carter can then listen to using screen reader tools. Read the whole article here!