The Bulletin
Statewide Vision Resource Centre
Number 18, Friday 17th November 2000
Inside This Issue
- Thanks to the Exam Supervisors and Scribes
- Mini Expo
- Writing Competition
- Guide Dogs Summer Holiday Program
- Manningham School Holiday Program
- Web Sites that Suck!
- Adapting Windows: Size, Colour and Contrast Matter
- How to Receive E-Access Bulletin
- Fun Vision Activities (SOFWeb Site)
- Audio Descriptions: Melbourne Theatre Company for 2001
- Independent Living Units for Young People with Vision Impairments
- Impediments to Literacy and Numeracy Acquisition
- Student News
- WBU on the Internet
- Support Skills Program for 2001
- RVIB Children’s Watersports Camp
PD – Term 4 2000
19-23 November: World Blind Union and Exhibition of Adaptive Equipment and
Services at Melbourne Town Hall
4 December: SVRC Mini Expo (details in Bulletin 17)
14 December: Braille Games Night BCA 6pm (details in Bulletin 17)
Thanks to the Exam Supervisors and Scribes
This year, Visiting Teachers and staff from the SVRC were involved with a
record number of exam supervisions – 50 exams in all. Quite a few students
required two supervisors or scribe and supervisor and matching students with
Visiting Teachers was quite an onerous task for Lyn. But she did it! And
as far as we know, the whole process has gone off without a hitch!
Thanks to all our supervisors and scribes on a great effort!
SVRC Mini EXPO
We hope to see you all at the SVRC Mini Expo on Friday 4th December 2000
– focusing on education issues for students with vision impairments. Please
bring your students, their families, school staff and interested people. There
is no cost for the Expo and lunch can be purchased from the Heatherwood Canteen.
SVRC Writing Competition 2000 – ‘I Wish…’
Details of the SVRC Writing Competition 2000 appeared in The Bulletin, Issue
16. The closing date for entries is Friday 24th November 2000. Call Deb Lewis
on 9841 0242 if you would like further details.
Summer Holiday O&M Program: ‘City Limits’
When: 8 - 12 January 2001
The Guide Dog Association of Victoria (GDAV) is offering a program exclusively
for secondary school students with a vision impairment. The program for January
2001 has been designed for students who are keen to extend their independent
mobility goals to the city of Melbourne.
Program Content:
This one week program will combine Orientation & Mobility sessions in
the Melbourne Central Business District with fun recreational afternoons and
evenings. The program will focus on learning to find your way around the
CBD, recognising major landmarks, using public transport, and gaining road
crossing tips for busy city streets. This week would be particularly
beneficial for those students considering employment or tertiary education
(eg RMIT or Melbourne University) based in the city.
Closing Date for referrals is 8th December 2000
If you require further information or would like to make a referral then
please do not hesitate to contact Shelley Pannier on 03 9854 4439.
School Holiday Program for Children with Disabilities
Manningham Aged and Disability Support Services will be conducting another
program at Bulleen Heights Special School and Heatherwood School during the
December 2000 / January 2001 school holidays. The program will provide respite
for families and carers by offering a supervised environment for children
with disabilities to explore new activities, meet new friends, and access
the community in a holiday atmosphere. The program provides fun, age and
ability appropriate activities including trips to Bimbimbie Fauna Park, Fantasy
World Indoor Play Centre, Cranbourne Royal Botanic Gardens and Werribee Zoo.
Applications are due 17 November 2000. Parents are advised to book now, as
places are limited. Please note that some eligibility conditions may apply.
When: Monday to Friday 20 – 22 December 2000, 3 – 25 January 2001
Time: 9am – 5pm
Cost: $20 per day
Contact: Nancy Raniere 0407 745086
Web Sites that Suck!
The following article was taken from ‘e-access bulletin’, a free monthly
email newsletter (http://www.e-accessibility.com):
‘Web sites that suck’ is the new section for Ten-20.com, a UK web portal for
disabled people. The section intends to name and shame sites that are inaccessible
to disabled people, which should really know better - sites for example like
‘youreable.com’ <http://www.youreable.com>, a disability information
service which recently won 1 million UK pounds in development money from
Channel 4’s ‘emillionaire’ show.
Here is a typically colourful quote from Ten-20.com: “Business is not all
about profit and loss, business is all about people, and people matter. Get
the people factor right and you are half way to a successful business. What
really gets my goat is when this profit factor is disguised and commercial
companies try to give the impression they are just there for the greater good
of mankind”.
Contributions or nominations are invited to help the new site take shape
at: http://www.ten-20.com/websitesthatsuck.html
Adapting Windows: Size, Colour and Contrast Matter
The following article was taken from the October 2000 edition of ‘e-access
bulletin’, a free monthly email newsletter http://www.e-accessibility.com
There are many ways that Windows operating software can be altered to improve
visibility for people with a visual impairment.
Ensuring that your screen resolution is no higher than 800x600 is a good
starting point - at this setting, text and pictures will be larger than at
higher resolutions. You should probably not select a lower resolution than
this, however - with versions of Windows any later than 3.x, choosing 640x480
resolution for example can cause problems with portions of more complex screens
disappearing off the side of the screen.
To change the display settings, pull up the Windows ‘Start’ menu and select
Settings and then Control Panel. Next double-click on the Display icon and
find the Settings tab to make the necessary changes.
It is also possible to increase the size, and change the colour, of the mouse
pointer icon, or change the shape of the icon from the standard arrow to
various other shapes.
Go to the control panel window as above, then open the Mouse box by double
clicking on the Mouse icon or moving to the icon with the arrow keys and
pressing Enter. Bring the Pointers page to the front by clicking on the tab
or pressing Control+Tab.
You can now use the arrow keys to move up and down through the standard pointer
schemes. There is one called ‘Windows Standard Large’. You may or may not
see ‘Windows Standard Extra Large’ depending on your installation. If you
do not, AbilityNet can supply the necessary software (see contact details
at the end).
The ‘Windows Standard Inverted’ schemes make the pointer white over a black
background and black over a white background.
The mouse pointer changes shape when it is over different objects. For example,
when it is over the document window it is a thin ‘I-beam’ that might be difficult
to see. It is possible to assign a more visible shape, such as the arrow,
to make the pointer easier to see at these times. The Large and Extra Large
pointer schemes have the larger arrow assigned to all instances where pointers
are more difficult to see.
Another visibility enhancement option is to change the colour schemes used
within Windows. Open the Control Panel as before and then open the Accessibility
panel by double clicking or moving the highlight with the arrow keys and
pressing Enter. Bring the Display page to the front by clicking on the tab
or pressing Control+Tab twice.
Now click the check box next to “Use high contrast” or tab once and press
the spacebar for the same result.
Click on the High Contrast Settings button or tab again and press spacebar.
A dialog box appears that allows you to choose the high contrast colour scheme
of your choice. These are predominantly white text on a black background or
black text on a white background. Click on your choice or tab once and arrow
up and down.
To increase the sizes of fonts used by Windows 95 or later versions in menus,
buttons and some dialogue and message boxes choose the Custom option and
tab again to the box in which you can arrow through schemes that include
the words ‘large’ or ‘extra large’ next to them which indicate that they
will affect the size of the text.
The one that might be considered to offer the best support for many visually
impaired people is ‘High Contrast Black Extra Large’. These colour schemes
can also be used as a starting point for your preferred combination of colours
and text sizes. Each screen element may be changed and the new colour scheme
saved under a new name.
To customise the colour schemes, open the Control Panel as before and then
open the Display item by double clicking or moving the highlight with the
arrow keys and pressing Enter. Bring the Appearance page to the front by
clicking on the tab or pressing Control+Tab twice.
This page contains a snapshot of a sample Windows screen and below a bar
listing the currently selected ‘colour scheme’.
To change to a new pre-set scheme, click the mouse on the ‘colour scheme’
box and press the up and down arrow keys. When the snapshot looks good press
the enter key to select it. Some of these ‘High Contrast’ schemes include
contrasting colours and larger fonts.
To create an entirely new colour scheme, first select one of the pre-defined
schemes as a basis for your own as above. Choose the item you wish to change
by clicking on a particular element in the snapshot window or by Tabbing three
times to and moving up and down through the ‘Item’ box below it with the
arrow keys.
You can change the foreground (text) and background colours of each item
by clicking on the coloured block (bottom right) or pressing Tab until highlighted
the block is highlighted and pressing Enter. A colour palette will appear
and you can click on or arrow around and press Enter on the desired colour.
To save changes click or Tab to and press Enter on the ‘Save As’ button, give
it a name and press Enter.
Windows 98 also has a utility that can enlarge part of the screen. If it
is not to be found in the Start menu, under Programs, ‘Accessories’, ‘Accessibility’
and ‘Magnifier’ then it will need to be installed from your Windows CD.
When running there appears at the top of the screen a window that shows a
magnified area of the lower screen. It will follow whatever is moving (although
there are bugs that mean that it won’t track as you type in Word 97 and perhaps
other packages too). Whenever the mouse is moved it will follow the pointer
to include that part of the screen in the magnified window.
Microsoft’s magnifier is really only useful as a backup for those who can
see the larger of the fonts in the ‘High Contrast’ colour schemes but who
have difficulty reading certain dialogue boxes that are unaffected by the
larger font changes.
* This article was produced in association with AbilityNet, a charity concerned
with all areas of computing and every disability, which acts as an independent
assessor of access technologies. For more information contact AbilityNet
on freephone 0800 269545, email: enquiries@abilitynet.co.uk
or see its web site:http://www.abilitynet.co.uk/
How to Receive ‘E-access Bulletin’
To subscribe to this free monthly bulletin, e-mail eab-subs@headstar.com
with ‘subscribe eab’ in the subject header. You can list other email addresses
to subscribe in the body of the message.
Fun ‘Vision Activities’
Visiting Teacher, Faye recently sent us some fun activities relating to vision
for students in the middle years of schooling from the SOFWeb site. The activities
demonstrating the following include:
- ‘Blinded by the Light’: Everyone has a blind spot in each eye. It marks
the place where the optic nerve which carries messages between the eye and
the brain, leaves the back of the eye. As a result there are no light-sensitive
cells on the back of the eye at that point.
- ‘Left or Right Eye’: Most people have a dominant eye. The brain will
choose to see the image that is coming from the dominant eye. Some people
do not have a dominant eye. The best baseball hitters do not have a dominant
eye.
- ‘Mirror Mirror, Who is Write’: Your cerebellum is the part of the
brain that controls voluntary actions such as writing. As you perform each
action your brain directs your senses (such as sight) monitor your actions
and provide feedback to the brain that you are performing the directions
properly. However, if you watch your actions in a mirror it appears you are
doing the opposite of what your brain is telling you to do. This creates
the uncertainty you feel.
- ‘Spot the Difference’: When you partly overlap the two spots, your
open eye and brain conclude that the sum of the two spots of light should
be brighter than one spot alone. If the spots overlap completely, the brain
seems to ignore one of them.
- ‘In a Dark, Dark Hole’: When light receptors in your eyes receive
light, they send a signal to your brain. A receptor receiving light also
sends signals to neighbouring receptors, telling them to turn down their
own sensitivity to light. When you look at the white wall without a tube,
you see a uniform field of brightness because all the receptors are equally
inhibited. When you look through the tube that you made from a full sheet
of paper, the spot of light is surrounded by the dark right of the tube. The
spot appears brighter because the receptors in the centre of your retina are
not inhibited by signals from the surrounding dark ring.
- ‘Eyes Remember’: The effect is called “persistence of vision”. Your
eyes see each little picture separately, but your brain stores up what it
sees and produces a continuous picture. Your brain retains any image for
about 1/30th of a second. The continuous picture is an optical illusion.
You can see the same effect when you wave a sparkler around in the dark.
The bright sparks seem to leave a bright line in their wake, but the reality
is that the track is not out there in space – it’s all in your mind.
You can find the links at http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au/science/famsci/activity/middleyr/biology/
Audio Descriptions: Melbourne Theatre Company Productions
The following dates performances will provide audio descriptions:
- ‘Man the Balloon’ – Saturday 20th January 4pm and Monday 22nd January
6.30pm
- ‘Art’ – Saturday 17th February 4pm and Monday 19th February 6.30pm
- ‘Betrayal’ – Saturday 17th March 4pm and Moncay 19th March 6.30pm
- ‘Design for Living’ – Saturday 7th April 4pm and Monday 9th April
6.30pm
- ‘The Tempest’ – Saturday 26th May 4pm and Monday 28th May 6.30pm
- ‘Three Days of Rain’ – Saturday 23rd June 4pm and Monday 18th June
6.30pm
The SVRC has an EASE membership which is available for use by Visiting Teachers
and their students – contact Deb Lewis. Book through the EASE ticket service
on 9699 8497 and notify EASE staff of any particular seating requirements
at the time of booking. Book early to avoid missing out.
Independent Living Units for Young People with Vision Impairments
Rachel Walmsly plans to set up Independent Living Units for young people
with vision impairments. She plans to form a committee of such young people
and then approach various groups and members of parliament for assistance.
The units will be specially tailored to provide a safe and secure environment
with appropriate lighting and facilities for people with limited vision. The
features to be included are the provision of plenty of natural light with
the use of skylights and windows. Features of the units will include:
- vertical blinds will be installed
- bench tops will be rounded
- shelving will be adequate to allow for a clear floor space
- interchangeable dials for the oven will cater to individual needs
- security button and smoke alarm
- caretaker on site
- drainage holes will allow for spillages in laundry, kitchen and bathroom
- contrasting smooth bench tops will allow for easy cleaning
- carpet will be the thick industrial variety
- tactile, contrasting and braille numbers will be affixed to the front
door
- personal clothes lines
- flat ground
- fenced gardens and vegetable patch will be tended by gardener
- space will be provided for guide dogs
Contact Rachel on 9772 9723 to obtain a copy of the survey or for further
information.
Impediments To Literacy And Numeracy Acquisition
>From Margaret Verick, ACROD:
Recently, Dr David Kemp, Commonwealth Minister for Education, Training and
Youth Affairs, advised ACROD that a project would be funded through his Department
to investigate in students who are blind or vision impaired. The target group
will also include students who are primarily large print users and students
who have multiple disabilities including significant vision impairment. The
project also requires the means of overcoming these impediments, including
the role of braille in the process, to be identified.
The Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) has now advised
that the select tendering process resulted in Jolley William & Associates
(Bill Jolley) being appointed as the consultants, in conjunction with Mike
Steer, Gillian Gale, Frances Gentle and Bruce Maguire. The project has commenced,
with a preliminary discussion paper due to be issued during the World Blind
Union 5th General Assembly in Melbourne later this month. This will involve
two presentations: a seminar for members of ICEVI (International Council
on Education of the Visually Handicapped) and a seminar on Enhanced Literacy
Through the Unified English Braille Code. The final report of the project
is due for completion in April 2001.
Student News
- One of Lillian’s former students, Ranmali has recently completed a
Bachelor of Applied Science with a Triple Major in Psychology, Nutrition
and Disability Studies. What a sterling effort!
WBU – General Assembly and World Blind Women’s Forum on the Internet
The following message was sent by John A Simpson, Organiser, WBU Fifth General
Assembly:
Thanks to the generous support and technical expertise of our Communications
Partner Cable and Wireless Optus, Australia's hosts for the WBU 5th General
Assembly and associated events have been able to arrange for a comprehensive
direct broadcast of the Event to be available via the
Internet.
Melbourne Australia will host more than 800 blind people and their associates
from 150 countries from November 15 to 25 for a series of events including:
- the Second World Blind Women's Forum - November 16 to 18
- the WBU 5th General Assembly - November 20 to 24
- an International Management Seminar - November 16 & 17
- VISTA 21C, an International Exhibition of Technology and Services
for blind people - November 19 to 23
- and more than 30 associated meetings and other events.
Through the WBU General Assembly website www.wbuga.org blind people, their
families and colleagues around the world will be able to keep in touch with
this most important event.
A twenty-four hour per day English Language stream will be in operation from
Wednesday November 15. This will include live and repeated coverage of all
conference sessions for the Women's Forum and General Assembly, as well as
other programming aired on WBU-FM our special Event Radio Service. All audio
material will be available in the Microsoft Media Player format
The website address is www.wbuga.org or
contact John Simpson at wbugajs@bca.org.au
Support Skills Program for 2001
Michelle Piggott needs to know the names of the students who want to come
to SSP for 2001. VTs will then be sent a "Subject Priority packages"
which will need to be returned to RVIB by mid December. Please contact Michelle
on 9808 6422.
And Finally
I will be taking a few days off during the next fortnight – you’ll find Helen
here on Wednesdays and Marion here on Thursdays during this period.
Regards from Deb Lewis
deblewis@svrc.vic.edu.au
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Web page editor Lyn Robinson. Last
updated November 2000
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