This issue was edited by Marion Blazé, Education Officer, Statewide Vision Resource Centre.
Welcome back for what is bound to be a busy and productive year. Our 2007 mission here at SVRC is to get you all reflecting on your role as supporters of education for students with vision impairments so that we can do this to the very best of our collective abilities and make the world a more friendly place for our young charges, both now and into the future. Quite an ambition, hey? Make sure you look at the program for our first PD day (Feb 12), which will be the beginnings of this theme.
Debbie Sukarna and David Hornsby have switched to a great new venue at The
Darebin Arts and Entertainment Centre at the Cnr of Bell and St Georges Rds
in Preston. Their first seminar is on Comprehension on Feb 17th.
Other seminars for Term 1 are:
For more information, contact Paula Welham on 9499 2065 (tel/fax).
For Research Higher Degree Studies in Special Education (Hearing or Vision Impairment)
Up to three scholarships are available, commencing in 2007, for candidates for part-time study for the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Philosophy in the area of special education (vision or hearing impartment).
The successful candidates will enrol at the University of Newcastle and will undertake their research programs through the Renwick Centre for Professional Education and Research —an affiliated Centre of The University of Newcastle which is administered by the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC). The Centre is located on the main campus of RIDBC in North Rocks, Sydney. Applications for off-campus study may be considered on the basis of a requirement for a residential component to the study program.
Each successful candidate will be offered a scholarship comprising a grant-in-aid allowance of up to $20,000 (for PhD) or $10,000 (for MPhil). These allowances will be to help defray the costs associated with candidature during the term of the degree program (i.e., up to 3 years for MPhil or 6 years for PhD). Successful candidates will be awarded an allowance to be distributed as grant-in-aid in response to claims for expenses. Eligible expenses include, research costs, including travel and purchase of equipment and consumables.
It is expected that studies by the successful candidates will commence no later than March 31, 2007.
For more information, prospective applicants should contact Professor Phil Foreman, Head of School, School of Education (phil.foreman@newcastle.edu.au or 02 49216292) or Professor Greg Leigh, Chair of the Renwick Centre (greg.leigh@newcastle.edu.au or 02 9872 0372). Information about 2007 Research Higher Degree programs at the University of Newcastle is available at: http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/rhd/prospectus/RHD%20Prosp.pdf.
Applications should be received no later than February 17th, 2007.
The Youth Disability Advocacy Service is running a course in advocacy training for young people with disabilities.
Chris Glavin runs a website devoted to providing resourceful information for a number of topics in education and disorders. He has created an information page on Deafblindness including communication, causes, books, videos, organizations, support services & mailing lists.
He asks us to please take a moment out of your day to visit the page. If you would like to help in any way please do not hesitate to contact him. He is always looking for individuals interested in providing articles and resources for Deafblindness.
Visit: http://www.k12academics.com/deafblindness.htm
If you are interested in presenting at the 2007 Round Table Conference you must submit an abstract of approximately 200 words by Friday, 2nd February 2007. Submissions of abstracts are invited for the 2007 Round Table Conference being held from Saturday 5th May to Tuesday 8th May 2007 at the Chifley Hotel, Adelaide, South Australia.
The conference Theme is "Print Disability: Developing Individual Lifestyles
in a Technological Age."
Full details are available on the Round Table Web Site. Go to http://www.e-bility.com/roundtable/
and follow the link under "National Conference”.
Get your students off to a running start this year. The inaugural Athletics Carnival and Picnic day is happening on Friday, March 30 (the last day of Term I) at the Bill Stewart Reserve in East Burwood. Please pass this information on to your students and their schools and families and we’ll try to get as many as we can involved in some fun and activity. The Eastern Region VTs have decided to make this their ‘excursion event’ and will be bringing along a group. What an excellent idea!!
When: Friday 30 March
Time: 9.45 to 2pm
Where: Bill Stewart Reserve, Burwood East Melway 62 C8
Fun activitiew are planned, with a picnic lunch, a chance to catch up with friends and ribbons will be awarded!
There will be two categories of participation: a "Championship division" and an "Achiever division", for students with additinoal disabilities.
Please send (PO Box 201 Nunawading 3131), email (deblewis@svrc.vic.edu.au) or fax (9841 0878) ASAP your expression of interest with the following information to the SVRC:
Source: Blind Citizens News, December 2006
When: Sunday 25th March, 2007 - Sandown Motor Circuit
Event Organiser: Peter Watts
Phone/Fax: 9844 3903 Email: peterwatts1@bigpond.com
This event is a project of the Lions Club of Warrandyte Inc. The purpose of the event is to provide blind and vision impaired people the opportunity to drive a motor vehicle.
Driving School Instructors from Independent Driving Schools offer their time and vehicles free of charge. The situation is similar to that experienced by a sighted person learning to drive. The Driving Instructor sits beside the blind or vision impaired person (V.I.P.) and talks him/her around the circuit. Each participant is allotted a half-hour segment, and for some, this is their first experience of being "In the Driver's Seat® " whilst for others it is an opportunity to relive pleasant memories. Minimum age for participants is 16 years. Participants must be physically capable of handling foot and hand controls.
This event is generously supported by the Ulysses (Shearwater) Motor Cycle Group, the Vintage Driver's Club, the '49-'59 Ford Customline Club, who provide the added excitement of rides in or on their various vehicles around the car park and surrounding access roads. It is envisaged that, between 11:00 and 11:30am bikers, and between 1:30 and 2:00pm the Vintage Driver's, will be able to take their respective vehicles with passengers around the Sandown circuit.Participants are invited to bring family and friends to share the day.
The day begins at 9:00am and concludes with a presentation at 3:30pm after the last group finishes their drive. The Lions Club of Warrandyte will provide a barbecue, tea, coffee and biscuits throughout the day for all free of charge. (To assist in defraying costs, a donation box will be located in the barbecue area for those who wish to voluntarily assist.) With 165 participants plus families, friends and volunteers we cater for between 500 to 600 people. For any queries or to register, contact Peter Watts on 9844 3903.
We have been sent some information from MS Australia (via Vision Australia) inviting us to promote their first “Melbourne Summer Cycle Event”. This is to be held on Sunday 25th Feb and it’s hoped that there will be 4000 bike riders. There is a choice of two rides 30km and 40km. Both rides commence at Alexandra gardens and finish at Lygon St.
More information at the web site http://www.melbournesummercycle.org.au/
Arts Access are interested in finding out about the experiences of people with
disabilities, including people who are blind or vision impaired when attending
the arts. This includes cinema, live performance, entertainment venues as well
as many more.
BCA view this as a positive step forward and encourage you all to consider submitting
your stories to ensure that the access issues of blind and vision impaired Australians
are more widely known.
If you are interested in submitting your story, please contact Bernie Clifford,
Arts Access by Feb 1, at bclifford@artsaccess.com.au
or mail to Bernie Clifford, Industry & Audience Development Manager, Arts
Access Victoria., 24 Eastern Road South Melbourne, VIC Australia 3205.
The National Braille Music Camp will hold its 22nd camp at a boarding school in Mittagong NSW. Students from age 10 years up come if they are braille readers and are interested in music. At the camp there is lots of singing, lessons in braille music and a lot of fun and friendship. Everything is provided. Planes and trains are met and campers bused to Mittagong. The dates are from Saturday evening 30 June to Saturday morning 7 July 2007. The camp fees are $180 and campers pay $135 towards their air fares. Should anyone find this a problem, please contact Roma Dix. There is adequate supervision and excellent blind musicians who take the singing and teaching.
Be warned, once a student has come to camp they will want to come back year after year.
For more details contact Roma Dix on (02) 4871 1086 or romad@westnet.com.au
Vision Australia and Blind Sports are running another day to come and try tandem bike riding. It’s on Feb 7 at Kooyong, so get in quick.
For further information contact Di Hayward on (03) 8872 7000.
Vision Australia and Blind Sports are running this try day on March 29th.
For further information contact Di Hayward on (03) 8872 7000.
Vision Australia and Aquability are running what looks like a fabulous trip to South Molle departing March 24 and returning March 31.
For further information contact Adrian Kellett on (03) 9585 7277 or adrian@aquability.com.au.
The latest ‘cheat sheet’ is now available for download. Our braillies have been attaching a helpful summary of commonly found changes to the maths code to the inside of Maths text books. You may find it a useful summary of the new braille and also a reference for teaching students. You'll find it here: http://www.visiontech.svrc.vic.edu.au/CSUEBmaths.doc
Thanks to Maria and the braille gang for this useful resource.
For those of you using Duxbury to translate to Unified English Braille, please
be aware that Duxbury have released a new UEB translation table which can be
downloaded from http://www.duxburysystems.com/joe/enuncp.zip
To install, download the file then copy into your Duxbury folder on C:\. The
new file should overwrite that which already exist within the Duxbury folder.
If you are using Duxbury 10.6, this new translation table should solve most of your troubles.
If you are using Duxbury 10.5, you will still experience some problems with symbols appearing immediately before an end style (such as </para.> or </h1.>). For example, an end quote will appear as a start quote and some wordsigns or shortforms will be uncontracted. This can be solved by inserting a space between the word/punctuation and the end style. Regardless of which version of Duxbury you are using, there are some new codes that you may find useful:
[u] - prevents a contraction
[ui] - inserts a grade 1 indicator
['] (Alt-F2) - inserts a dot 5 numeric space within numbers
[vrn~ida] - place at the top of the document to translate all spaced or double
hyphens as unspaced dashes.
[xcs] - breaks a capitals passage
[svgrn~{] - removes the letter sign from roman page numbers
[svgrn~;] - re-instates the letter sign for roman page numbers (use before page
v & x)
Alt-0149 - inserts a bullet
Alt-0150 - inserts a dash
Thanks to Leona Holloway, Australian Braille Authority Secretary for this information.
Quantum Technology are offering two awards:
For further information see the press release on the Quantum Technology website: http://www.quantumtechnology.com.au or contact Bronwyn Davies on (02) 8844 9888 or bdavies@quantumtechnology.com.au.
Every year we get questions about “Freepost for the Blind” which is a service funded by the Department of Social Security. Basically, braille and audio materials can be sent free of charge to and from registered organizations or blind people. The service does not apply to ANY print materials, even if they are about to be produced in Braille or audio format. It also does not apply to large print. Before advising schools, parents or students about this concession, read the section on our website which explains it in detail. http://www.svrc.vic.edu.au - go to ‘Concessions and Allowances’.
Thanks to Deb Lewis, Diana Hayward, Peter Le, Peggy, Kathryn Mackay, Di Francis, Renée Williamson, Charlie Roberts, Maria Elford and the braillies, Leona Holloway, Tammy Axelsen, Jessica Zammit, Frances Gentle, and Sue Rampling for contributing to this edition of The Bulletin. Thanks also to our fabulous proof-readers, stuffers and mailers.
Marion Blazé (who can be emailed at marionblaze@svrc.vic.edu.au).