By Sally Gajewski:
The first video iPad usage for the blind is a video showing Wesley Majerus, a blind person, using motion tools on an iPad to navigate all of its menus and programs. He demonstrates how to navigate around the iPad using two or three finger swipes and rotations along with other techniques. He can access iBooks to listen to audio books and search through webpages with a few complicated sets of movements. It is beyond amazing what he can do on the iPad and I wonder if other machines can do the same thing. If I had not seen this video, I would have thought it impossible for the blind to use technology is such a way, or at all. Really, it is great the world is researching tools and methods to help disabled persons, for they are people too just like us.
The Mountbatten - Assistive Technology for the Blind is a video demonstrating the braille typewriter of sorts, that blind persons may type with braille keys to produce braille text on paper. Other uses of the machine are saving these braille texts as a file on a computer and receiving such files to be oriented in braille. Lastly, the braille typewriter may translate braille to English letters on the computer, as a user of the typewriter inputs braille the computer writes the passage in Roman letters for the general public to see. This makes it all more accessible to disabled students to communicate with each other and the other students that can read the common letters.
By Brian Orr:
The video Teaching Math to The Blind is the single most innovative story I have heard, with respect to assistive technology. I had no more words after that video than "Wow! What next?" Technology is shaping our era to be the most influential for cultures, ever. We will change how the world works, thinks, feels for a long time into the future I believe. Being blind and able to keep up in at least simple math is revolutionary I'm sure. And the disabled are given tools to make them feel equal to the unafflicted we all can rejoice. And I do like the comment by the professor near the end. "Math is a hard subject, even for the sighted." I couldn't agree more. I have been through 4 levels of calculus and various physics courses, I still feel this way and always will and one reason I love Math for the struggle and eventual success!
The last research I did was on how we came to having assistive technologies for the disabled or impaired citizens beside us. And as Helen Keller is probably the most influential person to help disabled people, I thought I could introduce her. She was a deafblind child that was trained to be able to live independently, to do what no one thought was possible for people like her. Her mentor and "companion" was a woman named Anne Sullivan, who trained her to communicate in spite of Keller being both deaf and blind. Mastery of braille must have been essential to her education, as hearing and sight were of no help to Keller to educate herself. Beyond learning to read braille and execute sign language, Keller was taught to and mainly seemed to teach herself how to read lips with her sense of touch. She also was taught by teachers, among them Sarah Fuller, to speak herself with Keller feeling the way the mouth moves as someone speaks and the position of the tongue with various accents, vowels, and consonants. The inspiring methods Keller used and her enthusiasm to learn to be sufficient on her own give a great example to disabled children and people of all age. From her time forward, the disabled community can have hope for fulfilling their desires, and for the rest of the community to sympathize with their situation and aid them.
Image Sources: http://www.globalcalendar.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/braille.jpg, http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1005_coolest_office_furniture/image/006_braille_writer.jpg, http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/b9/50/57/b95057f5bc1cb8c119f9afb7082ea2f8.jpg, & http://www2.lhric.org/pocantico/womenenc/keller3.jpg
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