by Mike Rosen | Jan 13, 2015 | Event
What a perfect time and place to be writing this blog. 5:00 AM on January first. So quiet. The loudest sound is the clock ticking in the kitchen. Here in the living room, the Christmas tree is still looking robust and proud of itself. The strings of lights are unplugged but each of the fifty or so ornaments shines with its own unique significance. Oddly, these treasures include five old Thanksgiving turkey wishbones somehow saved in the box of Christmas decorations. Perfect! It’s a tree of metaphor – celebration, gratitude, memory, pride and continuation. It helps me arrange my inTACT reflections from 2014. There’s so much to celebrate. A stranger returning to our space after a year’s absence would be struck by one big change (not just one hundred square feet of new office space. ). Products! A year ago, most conversations with consumers felt like this. Them: “When?” Us: “Soon”. Now the shelves are loaded to capacity with labeled boxes of parts and materials and an inventory of inTACT Sketchpads and Erasers and packages of drawing sheets ready to ship. These past s many months the conversations have felt more like this: Customer: “We’d like to order”. Us: “How many?” Customer: “two of each”. Us: “We’ll ship Tuesday”. So much to be grateful for, most of all the blind individuals and organizations – maybe a hundred for each of the twelve days of Christmas – who confirmed with their words and their purchases that the need and the drive to draw is not limited to people with sight. So many parents and teachers to thank for deciding that...
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...
Recent Comments