The Experience of Studying Hebrew as a Student Who is Blind
Sarah Blake is a licensed minister with the Church of God (Anderson, IN). She is available to provide biblical teaching, ministry seminars, or music ministry for your church. Hear samples from some of her presentations and contact her for booking information.
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This page serves as a growing repository of resources for seminary students and faculty. My primary aim is to empower students with special needs and to assist seminaries to provide a welcoming environment and positive learning experiences. I was very blessed to study with open-minded and creative faculty at Anderson University, and I am very grateful to them for making it possible for me to complete my course requirements with a minimum of stress. On these pages, I share some of the things that we learned along the way in case they can be useful to people at other seminaries.
The greatest challenge we faced at AU was that of arranging for my language study. I needed two years of one language; but I am also a language enthusiast and hope to go on to further study someday. I graduated with two years of both Hebrew and Greek as well as a semester of teaching assistantship in Greek. This was no easy matter since I am blind and it is difficult to obtain textbooks in braille and to find a way for me to produce text in a format that both I and the professor can read. I put off attending seminary for several years because of fear about this dilemma. In the end, I found ways to meet the challenge; and I have been able to document my methods and create tools that are usable by seminary students across the country. My work is visible on the language study page. This page is a collection of resources which includes an overview of the techniques that a blind student uses when studying biblical languages, a detailed discussion of my experiences when studying Hebrew, information for blind students about how to set up their computers for displaying languages with a braille display and the JAWS screen reader, and links to additional resources for auditory learning.
Sarah J. Blake