Textbooks for blind students "come alive"
February 26, 2004
A standard textbook for primary or secondary school students is a robust learning tool rich with photographs, illustrations, charts, maps—visual images that bring the words to life.
Textbooks for blind or visually impaired students are considerably less dynamic. A full book may comprise as many as 15-20 bound volumes. All of the helpful graphic components are useless unless the teacher describes them. Locating a highlighted vocabulary word is cumbersome and difficult.
The learning status quo for these students may be changing as the result of a project completed by assistive technology experts at UB.
With $400,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Kathleen A. Beaver, Christine Oddo and Sumana Silverheels spent the past two years developing a prototype social-studies electronic textbook—more precisely, 13 social-studies prototype electronic textbooks and 10 supplements for grades 2 through 10—that include text, as well as descriptions of all graphic elements.
The electronic files are designed for use with an ingenious, classroom-friendly device called a portable refreshable Braille note-taker. The device converts electronic text into speech and into Braille that is "refreshed:" produced as a ticker-tape-like continuous stream that is created by moveable pins on a keyboard, which the fingers read the way the eye would track words across a page. The student can listen to the textbook or read it in Braille.
The new electronic textbooks will be available for use in classrooms across the nation this spring.