The School of Life Sciences teaching technical team often find themselves creating resources and implementing ideas to accommodate reasonable adjustments in our lab spaces. We work closely with students and the Disability Advice team to create solutions, so our students are accommodated in the many and varied practicals we deliver.

We wanted to create a solution for partially sighted students (and staff) to prepare slides for viewing under a microscope. Our teaching microscopes can be connected to and focused using a computer screen or iPad interface to view the slides at a greater size.

We took our idea and a microscope slide to postgraduate, open-source hardware for neuroscience, PhD student Marcus Burnell-Spector. Marcus delivered on the same day, and we were able to create a 3D printed slide guide (picture below). Once printed, teaching technician Sarah Roberts, finessed the slide guide by adding target markers and a non-slip matrix to its base. 

The 3D printed slide guide was successfully utilised in the practical and successful images were created from the slides the student made using this guide.

This is just one solution the School of Life Sciences technical teaching team have created for making labs more accessible. Other solutions have included braille resources, colour coding and adjustments to the lab environments, existing equipment and associated rooms. 

If you want to discuss adaptation ideas for practicals, please contact your teaching technical teams to discuss how they can help.