Number 12 Friday 6th August 1999
Inside This Issue
Professional Development for 1999
Space Camp 1999
The countdown is on - six weeks to our flight out - are you excited
because we all are!!! The following are the lucky folks who will be going:
Staff: Trish Potter, Deb Lewis, Janie McLeod
Students: Felmore from Colac HS, Nic from Bendigo SC, Kate from Mentone
GHS, Kristen from Sandringham SC, Jimmy from Balwyn HS, Orhan from Broadmeadows
SC
Now, we have had to resort to something we have never done at the SVRC before - fundraise through sales of chocolates. If you could buy some chocolate or better still, take a box to sell, we'd be eternally grateful!!! And if anyone knows anyone who would like to support our cause by donating money towards the cost of sending our chaperones and students to Space Camp, please call me at work - 9841 0242. Urgently.
Driving Camp 1999 :Charlton - November 22 and 23
Information and forms for the Driving camp in term 4 were included with Bulletin 10. There are two students on the paid up list so far -10 places to the first in with the paperwork and a $25 deposit (or better still, the full amount).
Mountbatten Workshop with Trevor Boyd from Quantum Technology
Trevor Boyd from Quantum Technology ran a fantastic Mountbatten training day on Monday which was attended by 30 keen participants, teachers, VTs, aides and parents from all over the state; Colac, Thomastown, Bendigo, Carlton and Corryong! For complete beginners like me, the mystery of the Mountbatten was revealed and for some of the more experienced users, scanners, keyboards and voice were explored. Yummy soup, cheeses and corn bread from the kitchens of Heatherwood School were enjoyed and everyone from this elite little group had the chance to exchange anecdotes and ideas. Some of the ideas that people came up with are:
"My Favourite Thing"- SVRC Writing Competition
The Statewide Vision Resource Centre will be conducting a writing competition this year. Students with a vision impairment are invited to enter the completion on the topic "My Favourite Thing". Writing must be accompanied by an illustration or artistic creation which relates to the written piece.
Four winners will be chosen from year levels:
All work will become the property of the SVRC.
Winners will be notified by mail. The decision of the judges is final.
Submissions must be postmarked or received electronically by 26th November 1999.
Entry Rules
Australian Braille Authority (ABA) Braille Proficiency Test
The Braille Proficiency Test will be held from 27 September to 11 October this year. Applications to sit for this test or requests for copies of the Trial Examination Paper should be forwarded to:
Debra Murphy
Secretary, Australian Braille Authority
c/o Royal Blind Society
4 Mitchell Street
ENFIELD NSW 2136
Phone: (02) 9334 3540
Fax: (02) 9334 3500
Email: dmurphy@rbs.org.au
The closing date for applications is 31 August 1999.
Cheques for $25 should be made out to Round Table and enclosed with
the application.
Blind Gymnast: Let the Medals Jingle
There is a delightful article in the April 1999 edition of The Braille Monitor by Tonia Valletta Trapp about her experiences learning to be a competitive gymnast.
She writes: "My first victory in gymnastics came when I turned my first cartwheel. Someone had tried to show me what a cartwheel looked like by using a Barbie doll, but I could not understand. In my eight year-old mind, I was a little girl, not a doll, and I was not able to imaging my body manipulating itself the way the doll moved in the hands of my coach. For weeks, maybe even months, I tried mechanically to turn a cartwheel, putting down slowly first one hand, then the other hand, then one foot, then the other foot. I felt like a long-limbed gorilla slapping the mat with my hands and clumping with my feet as I tried to force my body to turn itself properly. Then one day it happened without me even trying; in fact, that must have been why it happened. All of a sudden I found myself sliding smoothly through the air and landing in the same position I'd started in. I knew as soon as I landed that this was how a cartwheel was supposed to feel."
Call if you would like a print copy of the complete article.
Top 10 "Mistakes" of Web Design
From: Rob Garrett on Monday, 26 July 1999 10:56 on the ADAPTECH listserv
According to Jakob Nielsen the following "mistakes" of Web design make
access difficult for people with a vision impairment:
On Line: Issue 1 -1999 included an interesting article by Tom Macmahon, the Education adviser of Adaptive Technology Services in Queensland which discussed accessing CD-ROM based reference material and recommends the best encyclopaedias available - his preference at the time for easy access was Encyclopaedia Britannica 1997. He also discussed scanners and optical character recognition software. Please call if you would like a print copy of the article.
Audio Assisted Reading
The following summary is based on materials presented at the National Conference of the Council for Exceptional Children, Division on Visual Impairments, Salt Lake City in April 1997 by Carol Evans entitled "Audio Assisted Reading: Access to Curriculum for Students with Print Disabilities".
Carol Evans describes a method of presenting materials to students who have a learning disability in addition to a vision impairment. It is a method which uses recorded books together with the corresponding book in regular print, large print, print with a low vision aid (eg magnifier, CCTV), or braille. This method allows the reader to use all available avenues of sensory input simultaneously to acquire and process information. She calls this method Audio Assisted Reading to communicate the idea that it is reading.
According to Evans, some of the advantages over using either print or braille alone, or using recorded books alone are:
Helpful hints for recreational readingattention to the task may be improved because competing stimuli are screened out. decoding and comprehension may be improved if braille or print reading alone is slow and laboured. young children who are having difficulty learning the relationship between sounds and symbols, but who enjoy listening to stories, can be encouraged to discover these relationships by using recorded story books.
Look Alikes
Marion brought in an article from the July '99 edition of Melbourne's Child which describes an interesting sounding picture book. Produced by Hodder Headline, Joan Steiner has created 11 different scenes including a harbour, general store, city street and a hotel lobby, 'using more than 1000 familiar objects - everything from gloves to grenades!' For example, at first glance the harbour seems like any other waterfront, then you begin to notice that one of the boats is actually an upside-down iron, one of the skyscrapers is really a stack of CDs , a ship's railings are cigarettes and a ferry is a scrubbing brush.' Look Alikes' retails for $24.95.
I bought a copy for my niece over the weekend and it really is excellent - a serious time-waster!
Role Models and Good Ideas from the USA
As reported in Volume 1, Number 4 of Future Reflections, the Parents of Blind Children organisations in the USA have been busy.
The Louisiana Parents of Blind Children have organised a braille storybook hour at the local library where everyone has a copy of the book being read in print or braille as required; and a pool party has been attended by local families.
The Illinois Parents of Blind Children has a website at www.niu.edu/cseas/ipobc.html which includes and annotated set of links to selected information of interest to parents and teachers of blind children. They have also begun a new initiative 'Do You Have a Braille Menu' to help parents and friends encourage more restaurants to provide braille menus to their patrons.
New Mexico Parents of Blind Children have organised bowling events, camping trips including hiking, fishing and making s'mores around the campfire.
The Colorado Parents of Blind Children have begun a program called 'The Buddy Club'. The article notes that: "The Buddy Club connects competent adult blind role models with blind kids who have similar levels of vision loss. Each month, on a Saturday, the club meets to share an activity or an outing. Often the parents will meet separately while the adult buddies guide their young friends through the afternoon activities, demonstrating and encouraging independence skills. The blind adults in the club are role models for the parents as well as for the children. Activities have included a carnival, complete with games and arts and crafts; a scavenger hunt in the neighbourhood to find the braille words missing from a story; ... and once the weather was nice, an old-fashioned picnic with tug of war, relay races and other active games."
Fun Sites You Can Go To With Your Kids
Sydney Morning Herald - www.smh.com.au/index.html
From this exciting site, you can read the Sydney Morning Herald! It has articles, news in brief and photos. There are links from articles to related material and editorial comment. There are links from the home page to letters; crosswords; weather; lotto results; classifieds; TV guide; footy; rugby; and the Olympics. The Text Index has links to national, world and business news; sport; regular columns; features and weekly sections. From the archive, you can find articles form the past month and search by key words.
NASA is my Playground - www.nasa.gov/kids.html
This site has links to - 'some cool NASA sites just for kids' including:
You can enter your name to be included on the Mars 2001 Lander CD-ROM. You can collect your certificate when you click the "Add My Name"button. The goal is collect several million names!
What's on Oprah's Night-Table This Month? - www.edbydesign.com/kidsact.html
This site has kid's activities for children 5 to 12 years old. There are stories, jokes and riddles, poems, test your maths skill, puzzles and games. It looks like heaps of fun!
101 Ways to Use Braille
Ellen Waechtler, a braille instructor in the rehabilitation program at Blind Industries and Services of Maryland opens her article in the March 1999 edition of The Braille Monitor from which excerpts appear below, by saying:
'Have you ever opened a can, hoping to add tomatoes to your spaghetti sauce, and then been faced with the dilemma of figuring out how to incorporate green beans into the menu? Have you every spent hours searching for a particular CD or tape, becoming increasingly frustrated with each incorrect CD you briefly sampled? Or have you ever been worried about losing your phone service because you mislaid the bill and are unable to find it in your mile-high stack of mysterious print papers? In all these cases, braille could simplify your life... Herein lies braille's power: it enables you to communicate with yourself. Braille serves the same function for the blind as print does for the sighted, and with a little creative thinking it can be just as versatile... Your only boundaries will be imposed by the limits of our imagination.'
Tools and methods:
The copy of the entire article is available in print by request.
Scientific Calculator - The VisAble Scientific Calculator
The VisAble Scientific Calculator was developed with support from the Ontario Rehabilitation Technology Consortium (ORTC), Industry Canada, Betacom Corporation, and the University of Waterloo Centre for Sight Enhancement (CSE).
According to promotional material, the VisAble Scientific Calculator performs scientific, statistical and trigonometric calculations. Focus groups were used to determine the functionality and visibility requisites for each feature of the calculator, including its display, keypad and instruction manual. The VisAble Scientific Calculator can be operated easily by a majority of low vision users. In addition, people with 'normal' vision often find the VisAble Scientific Calculator easy and more relaxing to use.
Published surveys of high school students suggest that many visually impaired students are allowed 'to slip by with less mathematical skill than they are capable of mastering' simply because the materials, time and assistance that they require are not available to them. Many students resist using 'special' tools in the classroom because they do not want to appear different from their peers. Consequently, students with low vision systematically abandon science and mathematics courses as they progress through high school. These decisions have a profound impact on the future education and career options for these students.
Features of the VisAble Scientific Calculator
Accessible Visual Display Output
From the Internet
Word Prediction Software
From Judy Gray (ATS), Monday, 17 May 1999 9:24 AM
I thought you may be interested in seeing a comparative overview of word prediction software for Windows 95. The overview, developed by Janice Hecht and Barbara Heinisch at the Adaptive Technology Lab Southern Connecticut State University, is presented in the form of two charts and compares features of Aurora, Co:Writer, E-Z Keys, GUS, HandiWORD, KeyRep, Telepathic 11 and TextHELP!. It can be found at http://www.southernct.edu/departments/atl/wordpred.html/.
Reviving the Braille Slate (Handframe)
Judith Dixon (AERNET: 11 July 1999) has created a website for her collection of braille and tactile-writing slates, of which she has details on 190 examples from 25 countries. She also has descriptions and photos of various aspects of braille slates -hinges, pins, special features etc and hopes that this review will help inspire us to take a fresh look at braille slates as a vital literacy tool for blind people. You can find her website at www.brailleslates.org/.
Large Print: Preferred Fonts and Colours
From: Dona Sauerburger (AERNET), Tuesday, July 06, 1999 2:28
Here is a summary of some of the valuable information from a discussion concerning fonts and paper colour for large print readability:
Contributors to the discussion were readers of large print as well as professionals, and included Marshall Flax, O.D., Greg Goodrich, O.D.; Elaine Kitchel, Low Vision Project Leader for APH; Drew Laurence; Joe D'Ottavio; Lynda Ryan; and Dennis Siemsen, O.D.
With a few exceptions, the consensus was that plain fonts that have no serifs are easiest to read (serifs are the little lines that embellish letters).
Several people reported that having space between the letters is as important as font type. Letters shaped with larger openings are also more readable.
According to Dr. Dennis Siemsen, Gordon Legge and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota Low Vision Lab suggested using a font that is not proportional, such as regular courier, and non-proportional Helvetica.
Several contributors suggested that some of the features that make fonts more attractive to readers with normal vision make them less readable to people with impaired vision. For example, one of the most popular fonts for normal print, Times New Roman, has serifs, is proportional, has very little space between the letters, and the letters are not open in shape. Apparently each of these features makes it harder for people with low vision to read, even though many people with normal vision prefer it.
Common fonts which people preferred include Arial, Antique Olive, and Helvetica, none of which have serifs. Drew Laurence said the Geneva font in bold is better than Helvetica and Arial because the letters are more open and the space between each letter is larger.
In a recent survey by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), according to Elaine Kitchel, over 500 students who are large print users were presented with sample readings in a variety of fonts, all in 18 point size. They were asked which font was easiest to read. Nearly 58% chose Verdana (a style similar to Arial but the letters are a little more wide open and less proportional than Arial; Antique Olive and Tahoma are also very similar to Verdana). Arial was a distant second at 19% and Helvetica came in at third place at 18%. Times New Roman, ITC Officina Sans Book and Courier only received fractions of a percent.
Arial, Antique Olive, Tahoma and Verdana have no serifs. Courier is the only font of those listed above whose letters are not proportional (that is, all the letters are the same width).
Choosing an appropriate size font can be tricky because when using the same point size, many of the fonts without serifs are larger than other fonts.
The colour and brightness of the paper also affect the readability. Glare off the paper of course makes the print harder to read, and good contrast with the print is important. In the same APH survey mentioned earlier, the large print readers were asked whether they preferred bright white paper, dull white, shiny white, or some other color. Fifty seven percent said they preferred dull white.
These students stated that the attributes that were most important to them in large print were (ranked by order of importance):
From: Doug Piper, Friday, 14 May 1999 10:26 AM
Doug Piper, Access Technology Advisor, Disability & Learning Difficulties Unit, NSW Department of Education & Training. Phone: (02) 9886-7306 and speced3@ozemail.com.au
I have compiled the following for people's professional (and personal) interest. The contacts are intended to be introductory in nature and NOT an all inclusive list. As per usual with net based resources they are provided with the best of intentions but with no guarantees. One point that has to also be made is that while VRS works well for some individuals in controlled situation, it does not work all that well in a classroom environment. It would appear from classroom feedback that this is because of the associated environmental sounds that are found in such a dynamic situation. The technology attempts to convert such sounds into text.
Hope the following are of interest and use.
There are three main commercial players in the voice recognition arena who all have web sites:
Another possibility is http://voicerecognition.com/1998/trends/ or http://www.voicerecognition.com/voice-users/ which is run by a reseller that contains some information and reviews mainly on the Dragon products.
Dragon has also announced they are developing a version of Naturally Speaking for the Macintosh. Details available at:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1999/may/10appledragon.html
A UK based company (iANSYST Ltd Dyslectech) has reviews of over 15 systems currently available http://www.dyslexic.com/dictcomp.htm
Also in the UK, BECTA is undertaking a school based research project and the details are at http://www.becta.org.uk/projects/voicerecog/index.html
The latest Microsoft-Research Speech Development kit (Speech Applications Programming Interface) is now available from http://microsoft.com/iit/sapisdk.htm.
The September 98 PC Computing from the US had a brief review of four speech recognition systems:
An unofficial Dragon Naturally Speaking Information Page is at http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm
A Susan Fulton';s has a web site on voice recognition at http://www.out-loud.com/
The New Zealand site http://webnz.co.nz/ability/ site has a series of links that might also assist.
If you have RealAudio, you might want to listen to a talk at http://www.rit.edu/~easi/audio/resna.html from the RESNA conference which was called Evaluating Voice Recognition programs.
A few other sites that might be of use include http://www.edc.org/FSC/NCIP and http://www.snow.utoronto.ca/best/manual2.html
Speaking to Write: Realising the Potential of Speech Recognition for Secondary Students with Disabilities have a new Web site at http://www.edc.org/spk2wrt
There are also a couple of newsgroups:comp.speech and comp.speech.users
There is also a related listserv which is a moderated email discussion forum for students or adults who have used speech recognition technology themselves or with students with disabilities. The primary focus of the discussion is on the educational and logistical issues associated with the use of speech recognition technology by students with disabilities at home or in school settings.
To subscribe to the spk2wrt listserv, do the following:
1. Create an email message to: majordomo@mail.edc.org
2. Leave the subject line blank
3. In the body of the message, type: subscribe spk2wrt
You do not need to include your email address or name. (Remember to
turn off your signature tag)
4. Send the message
SensWide Services
According to their brochure: 'SensWide is a specialist service that offers additional suport to jobseekers who are vision impaired, hearing impaired, deaf or deafblind. SensWide's staff are professionally trained in the field of sensory impairment. They are ready to assist in the provision of resources, training, education and advice that will help to create positive employment outcomes. SensWide operates throughout Victoria and is available directly to employment services, jobseekers, employers and other organisations...Services include:
SensWide Services can be contacted:
Level 9, 250 Queen Street
Melbourne 3000
Phone: (03) 9642 8848
Fax: (03) 9642 8750
Email: senswide@smart.net.au
And finally.....
Hope several thousand dollars will find their way into the Space Camp bank balance really soon so that I can stop worrying..... And by the way, Rita's photos are excellent!
Deb Lewis