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The South African division of the fast food chain Wimpy provides menus in Braille. To get the word out, its chefs produced hamburger buns with sesame seeds carefully arranged on the surface to spell out words in Braille. At the link, you can watch a video of visually impaired people reacting to the burgers.
Akanksha Jain would like to make a zoo in Ahmedabad, India accessible to visually impaired visitors. One cool feature that she’s designed is a handrail with Braille descriptions of animals and their environments, as well as button-activated sound recordings. She’s also devised relief maps and animal models that visitors can use to navigate the zoo and learn about its residents.
A school in São Paulo, Brazil trains people who are visually impaired — many completely blind since birth — to be graceful and coordinated ballet dancers. Fernanda Bianchini opened her school in 1995 and developed an effective way of teaching dance by touch to hundreds of students. A few of her students have even become professional dancers.
-via Oddity Central | Previously: Super Mario Bros. Ballet
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Robert Ainsley-Raffel of Hexham, UK, has been blind since birth. But he’s determined to achieve the goals that he’s set for his life, including becoming a qualified plumber and a certified diver:
Robert passed his dive theory test with a flying 100% mark and is now looking forward to his first open water dives en route to a full Ocean Diver qualification.
Robert – who takes a white stick under water with him, saying that “it stops me banging my head” – is undaunted by his disability. He says: “I haven’t got a problem being blind – it’s other people that aren’t prepared to step outside the box and find a way around problems that I have the biggest trouble working with.”
Link -via Blame It on the Voices | Photo: Journal Live
In
1688, Irish scientist William Molyneux asked philosopher John Locke "if
a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres
and cubes, could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given
the ability to see?"
That philosophical thought experiment, called Molyneux's Problem, stood for centuries until MIT researchers Richard Held and Pawan Sinha collaborated with Indian surgeons to operate to restore sight in children who'd been blind from curable causes:
Held, Sinha, and colleagues recruited five children, ages 8 to 17, from Project Prakash to tackle Molyneux's question. The researchers built 20 pairs of simple shapes from toy blocks and tested the children within 48 hours of the surgery to restore their sight. The children had not encountered these unusual shapes before. [...] After feeling a shape, the children did only slightly better than chance at identifying it by sight alone, the team reports online today in Nature Neuroscience.
That result suggests a negative answer to Molyneux's question. Because many children travel long distances for the operations, most go home with their families before the researchers can do follow-up experiments, Sinha says. However, when the researchers retested two of the boys with a new set of shapes a few days later, their accuracy on the touch-to-vision experiment jumped to above 80%. That suggests a more nuanced answer of "initially no but subsequently yes," Sinha says.
"It's a great story," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The change in the children's ability to integrate touch and vision happens too fast to be explained by major rewiring in the brain, Pascual-Leone says. Even though they grew up recognizing objects by touch, they needed only a little bit of visual experience to learn to translate between the two senses. "They're not starting from zero," he says.
Link (Photo: Pawan Sinha)
Terry Garrett has been blind since the age of 10, but he can play certain video games exceptionally well by using in-game sounds to figure out his character’s environment. Garrett is especially skilled at the game Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee:
The beep of a blinking bomb, the desperate cry of a friend in need, the pounding of a Mudokon’s hammer: They all provide crucial details that enable Garrett to get through the game’s punishing levels. When he needs orientation, Garrett listens carefully for “sound landmarks” like running water or footsteps shifting from grass to earth. And as he works his way through the side-scrolling puzzler’s world of weird creatures, Garrett pieces the noises together and sees the game’s levels laid out in his mind.[...]
Today, Garrett can beat the entire game, executing every jump and step with near-perfect precision. He’s honed his hearing to the point where he can recognize exactly which sounds refer to each object and act accordingly. He hasn’t memorized every level, but he knows enough about the sound design to beat Oddworld without dying.
“Through Abe’s sounds, I was able to figure out how to navigate the world,” Garrett, now an engineering student at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told Wired.com in an e-mail.
According to its creator, Oddworld wasn’t created with visually-impaired playing in mind. But the role of sound in it makes it well suited for that purpose.
Link | Photo: Oddworld Inhabitants
Previously: Three Men Create 100,000-Keystroke Script So That Blind Gamer Can Complete a Video Game
Graham Waspe had been aided by his guide dog Edward for six years. When Edward himself began to lose his sight, Mr. Waspe acquired a new guide dog, Opal, who helps not only him, but Edward as well:
Mr Waspe’s new dog is not just aiding his owner to carry out everyday tasks, but also helping Edward to get around.
Mr Waspe, of Stowmarket, Suffolk, received his new dog last November after Edward developed the inoperable problem which resulted in him needing both eyes removed.
And the two-year-old bitch has stepped in where Edward left off as they tour their old haunts together.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Alex Fairfull
Peter Eckert lost his sight as an adult, but that didn’t stop him from becoming an accomplished, professional photographer. He won the grand prize at Artists Wanted: Exposure 2008, an international exhibition. In the above short film about his work, Eckert says:
My blindness — while it might be a curiosity and it’s kind of a hook on some of my work and stuff — I try to stand on the work, not on the idiosyncrasy of my disability.
Artist’s Website via The Agitator
Researchers led by Eberhart Zrenner of the University of Tuebingen, Germany, have developed an eye implant that is able to restore partial sight to people suffering from a form of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa:
One subject, 46-year-old Mikka Terho from Finland, was able to read large letters and a clock face, and differentiate between shades of gray a few days after the implant and his eyes eventually became adjusted to the light.
The chip, operated by a battery-powered cable implanted behind the ear, converts light into electrical impulses that act on the optic nerve. The device did not work on the other eight volunteers because it was implanted less deeply in the eye, according to the paper.
Link via io9 | Image: Zrenner, et al.
A San Francisco architect who developed sudden blindness has carved out a successful career as a consultant to architectural firms.
Shortly before he was laid off, Downey had found a blind computer scientist who had devised a way to print online maps through a tactile printer; it worked for architectural drawings too… then I realized that the way he reads his drawings is not dissimilar to the way we experience space. He’ll be walking through a plan with his index finger, discovering things, and damn, he’s walking through the building!” They talked through other issues. Load-bearing columns that seemed likely to snag a cane. A dramatic staircase that would deposit patients in the center of a big, disorienting room…
The rest of the story is at The Atlantic.
Link. Photo credit Don Fogg.
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Art student Danielle Pecora from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn designed this ball to help children learn how to read Braille:
Looking a bit like a stiff Koosh ball, it has 26 magnetic pegs, each depicting a letter of the alphabet in Latin on one side and Braille on the other. The object’s to fit the pegs into 26 circular indents in the ball that are themselves embossed in Braille letters. “A” in Braille, for instance, is a single dot, so you’d find the peg with one dot, then match it to the spot on the ball with one dot. An electronic device in the ball chimes when you get a letter right. It’ll also verbalize what letter you’re touching when you run your fingers over the indents.
Link | Photo: Pratt Institute
Ellie, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, is almost completely blind. Her owner is trying to find the money necessary for eye surgery. In the meantime, Leo, a German Shepherd, has taken up the role of seeing eye dog for Ellie.
“Ellie has cataracts on both eyes and is only aware of shadows,” explains Jean Spencer, manager of Rochdale’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. “But Leo, who’s an absolutely massive dog, has become her eyes. It’s touching to watch them together. She follows him around and snuggles up to him.”
The dogs’ owner, Julie Lander, described how Leo helps Ellie:
Lander goes on to explain how Leo’s almost 90 pounds of bulk helps keep his new charge safe. “I take them for walks in the park and Leo guides Ellie around. He is so protective and herds the more boisterous dogs away from her,” Julie says.
Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo: Emma Williams, Manchester Evening News Syndication
Previously: White Cane for Blind Dog
NASA worked with Braille experts to create a tactile representation of the Carina Nebula:
The 17-by-11-inch color image is embossed with lines, slashes, and other markings that correspond to objects in the giant cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds. The image’s design is also useful and intriguing for sighted people who have different learning styles.
“The Hubble image of the Carina Nebula is so beautiful, and it illustrates the entire life cycle of stars,” says Mutchler, who, along with Grice, unveiled the tactile Carina image in January 2010, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. “I thought that people who are visually impaired should be able to explore it and learn from it, too.”
The South Korean company Primpo has developed an improved cane for the visually impaired. It vibrates with increasing intensity as its sensor approaches an object. It can also detect colors:
Unlike conventional white canes, with which a user can not detect obstacles above waist height, the “Isonic” model can detect obstacles within a range of 25 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically with an integrated supersonic sensor.
The product can also detect obstacles within a distance of 2 meters, as well as very slim objects, narrower than 3cm. With decreasing distance to an object, the cane’s vibrating indicator sends a stronger signal to the user, pinpointing the location of the obstacle.
A feature to inform a visually impaired user of an object’s color draws special attention. With a color sensor attached, the user is informed by voice messages of 10 detectable colors and their brightness, including red, orange and blue.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: Aving.net
Jordan Verner of Ontario had a dream: he wanted to complete Orcarina of Time, a video game in the Legend of Zelda franchise. But he is blind, which makes playing a video game, let alone completing it, very difficult. Three men who read of his predicament on the Internet responded by writing a complete, keystroke-by-keystroke guide to completing the game.
Link via Geekologie
A fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine explains that knowlege about and usage of Braille by visually impaired people is declining as they shift to electronic means of acquiring information.
The trend is real and significant; nowadays fewer than 1 in 10 blind children learn Braille. Part of the problem is that Braille is intrinsically an inconvenient medium:
Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall.
The replacements for Braille are audiobooks, computer text-to-speech, and other auditory technologies. The upside for the visually impaired is a much more rapid acquisition of knowledge. The potential downside is a flawed understanding of language itself.
“What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”
Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words.
The question extends well beyond obvious things like spelling words or distinguishing homonyms to the broader concept that the acquisition of the ability to read actually shapes the brain itself, and that people from literate societies actually think differently from members of oral societies.
Link. Image credit Tom Schierlitz.
Normally, babies learn how to look at the world before they can communicate their experiences. The rare cases of people who have been blind all their lives and then had their sight restored offer scientists a unique opportunity to study how we learn to interpret visual signals. MIT professor Pawan Sinha is studying children and adolescents in India who are seeing the world for the first time after treatment for blindness.
MIT neuroscientists asked patients who had recently had their sight restored to identify and trace the shapes they saw. While a normally sighted person would likely trace two overlapping squares, these patients interpreted the drawing as three separate shapes.
Research so far suggests that seeing moving objects is crucial for learning to interpret visual signals in the three-dimensional world. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Sinha Laboratory/MIT)
Still in the concept stage, the Touch Color is a device that would allow visually impaired people to create two-dimensional art:
This innovative device comprises a Rainbow Picker in a form of a scroll wheel, which contains Braille dots that allows blind people to select a color from 24 available. After selecting a color, this device differentiates the colors by generating varied temperatures through LED bulbs. Then the user can paint on a thermal art board by using their fingers and the thermal-color display technology keeps the track of the lines and colors the blind artist is using.
There are more pictures and diagrams of this gadget at the link.
If you’re visually impaired, it can be hard to fill a mug (or any other vessel) without spilling over the edge. The Braun Bell Mug beeps at each of three different levels, so the user can know how much liquid s/he’s getting, without making a mess.
Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a helmet that helps visually impaired people make use of echolocation to find their way around:
The system takes real-time imagery of local obstacles, be they stairs, walls, or trees, as well as moving objects like cars and other people, and alerts the wearer using the sounds perfected in the Spanish echolocation system mentioned above.
The helmet uses stereo headphones to denote where the objects are relative to the wearer, and the volume of the sound indicates the distance. The device has a 60-degree range of vision, and can identify objects as far away as 15 feet. The researchers are also currently looking to integrate GPS data into the rig, so that users can use it to plot specific courses.
Engineering students at Virginia Tech have built a car that can be driven by the visually impaired. The vehicle is equipped with laser range finders and a semi-autonomous computer that helps direct drivers around a course that they can’t see:
The steering wheel is hooked up to a distance monitor that gathers information from laser range finders, and it uses voice software to tells the driver how far to turn the wheel. For example, the monitor will tell the driver “turn left three clicks.” As the driver does that, the monitor makes three clicking noises.
A vibrating vest provides cues to follow when accelerating and decelerating. The vest vibrates in different places — the back, the belly and the shoulders — to convey different commands. When the entire vest vibrates, it means, “Slam on the brakes!”
