by Mike Rosen | Apr 21, 2014 | Tactile Graphics
First a disclaimer. We at E.A.S.Y. LLC have probably taken note of the tactile graphics skills and attitudes of close to two hundred BLV people, and half again as many sighted individuals with personal and professional ties to the BLV world. Despite this exposure, I can’t claim to be a scholar of this topic. I’m not a perceptual psychologist and I haven’t done controlled studies of the drawing capabilities of people with limited or absent vision. (Partly, that’s because the 24-7 task of building our start-up and developing our products has made it difficult to find the time for research – a painful truth for a life-long academic.) So there; I’ve implicitly apologized for any inaccurate observations or naive interpretations presented below. Reader beware. Mike Coleman from the UVM Engineering Faculty; Susan Edelman from Education; Gayle Yarnall, access technology consultant and advocate in Massachusetts; and I do have a small pilot project underway, funded by the UVM REACH Program. We’re trying to get a sense of the major influences on kids’ ability to explore and understand tactile graphics, and their skill in making original raised-line drawings. We’re doing home-made evaluations of a dozen BLV children and youth in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts with the cooperation of numerous teachers and parents. In these trials we are sampling the tactile, spatial and linguistic experiences and abilities of BLV youngsters in the hopes of predicting what skill with tactile graphics might reasonably be expected from each of them. By the end of this week (April 25th six of our participants, ranging in age from 3rd that the primary outcome of this...
by Mike Rosen | Apr 2, 2014 | Rosen
March 14 to 16, Crowne Plaza, Baton Rouge Louisiana. That was the time and place of the Louisiana NFB Affiliate Convention. I attended as a representative and salesperson for E.A.S.Y. LLC, the Vermont start-up making waves in the world of tactile graphics. This must be the sixth State Convention I’ve attended, and one thing became clear fast; NFBLA has it’s act together. Two hundred and forty people were registered, organization was impeccable, and spirit was high. As an engineer, entrepreneur and sighted human, NFB gatherings are always interesting, but this one was a standout. I shared the exhibit hall with Rick Payton of Southern Assistive Technology. Just two booths seemed a little light, but Rick is a 30-year veteran in access technology and had a lot of product areas covered. The room attracted little traffic on Friday but my concerns were eased when a non-stop stream of people came through on Saturday. And what people they were. I met a couple who had met each other years earlier at the Louisiana Center for the Blind. They were accompanied by their daughter, now at the Center, accompanied by her boyfriend, whom she met at the Center. “Center” indeed. At the booth and at the Banquette I heard for the first time (I am, after all, an outsider) about Convention children who… ahem… whose birth could be directly attributed to the good times enjoyed by their parents at Convention. I met a young blind student, American, who used our inTACT Sketchpad to draw tactile Chinese character and speak for me the phrase they represented; and then switched to writing Greek, verbalizing in...
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