Esther Medley of Centralia (U.S.) is legally blind, but when she bowls, she can see a bit of the floor to line up with the lane.
Medley (94) can't see straight ahead, so her 86-year-old husband Ralph tells her which pins are left after her first ball.
That's how Medley recently bowled a score of 244, which included eight strikes. It was the second-highest score of the year for her league.
The Medleys have been playing in the senior league since 1979.
A stall put up by the social welfare organisation, ‘Voice of World’, at the 31st Kolkata book fair, gave the visitors a chance to view the world of visually impaired people. Books and magazines on Braille were also on display.
Sukumar Chakraborty, former student and presently, the principal of Voice of World, said “Here we have our special collections on Braille such as the Sharadiya collection, Thakumar Jhuli, Romeo Juliet and Hashikhushi.”
Legally blind Brittney Holland can't remember a time when she wasn't barrel racing. At just 15, the Aledo (Texas, U.S.A.) native has already made quite a name for herself.
Barrel racing is a horse riding event in which riders ride in a set pattern around three barrels in a triangular arrangement.
Brittney is placed in the top five of her district, for youth. Not bad considering most of her competitors can see.
It may turn out to be the most revolutionary step in the field of visual disability since Louis Braille’s embossed dots on thick paper in 1829. Divya Drishti, or divine sight, is a high-tech, infrared-based system that helps blind people in spatially orienting themselves, thereby facilitating navigation within closed environs such as offices, railway stations and even malls.
Developed by Pallavi Tiwari and Dhruv Sakalley, final year biomedical engineering students of ‘Shri G.S. Institute of Technology and Science’, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, the system is easy to operate.
With more than 29 years of combined experience and education in the high tech sector, Sharlyn Ayotte’s drive to make accessible materials available to the blind community resulted in the launch of her company.
Sharlyn’s Ottawa (Canada) based T-Base Communications provides companies and organisations with alternate format communication services for their blind and partially sighted customers. The company specialises in producing accessible communication materials in Braille, large print, e-Text and audio formats.
The ninth Round Table Blind People car rally was organised jointly by the Round Table India (R.T.I.) and Blind People's Association (B.P.A.) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
A feature of this rally was that the route map was given to the participants in Braille just a few minutes before the commencement of the rally. The blind navigators then had to guide the sighted drivers to the destination.
The challenge was to read the route map perfectly and enable the drivers to reach the finish line on time.
Annah Poteat travels across North Carolina (U.S.) helping manufacturing facilities increase their efficiency through N.C. State University’s Industrial Extension Service. She’s a specialist in Lean Manufacturing Technique.
The basic concept of lean manufacturing is to reduce the inherent waste in the manufacturing process by lessening the downtime that a product spends between stages of manufacture.
Under the ‘White Cane Path Project’ visually impaired people can look forward to a safer trip to the shopping mall, restaurants etc., in Penang, Malaysia.
The Rotary Club is funding a 1.5 kilometre pathway connecting ‘Saint Nicholas Home’ to One-Stop Midlands Park. The home is a centre for the care and rehabilitation of children and adults with visual or multiple sensory disabilities.
Visiting your favourite restaurant or pub may no longer be a chore. Now, pointing your cell phone in a particular direction, can precisely establish its location, and the easiest way to get there. Researchers at Britain’s Southampton University have reportedly developed a cell phone with interactive information to find local points of interest on a map. According to the research, a system called Map Snapper has been created that processes a snapshot of a printed map, captured on camera phone, and forwards an interactive version of the same map back to the handset.
After series of fruitful discussions with the members of the National Federation of the Blind (N.F.B.), the Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh has assured to bring about reforms, to improve the condition of visually impaired persons in the country.
The major breakthrough being the participation of the Government to bring about change. The Prime Minister has agreed to three main demands of N.F.B. that will bring about an improvement in job opportunities for visually impaired persons.
Blind Eileen Scrivani, an avid knitter, expressed concern that Dynamic Resource Group’s (D.R.G), U.S.A, website ‘FreePatterns.com’ was inaccessible to visually impaired people. As a result, the company researched on accessibility and made the necessary technological changes. Now, all its free patterns are tagged to enable screen readers to translate them into audio format.
Computer technology allows for the conversion of information on a computer screen into either audio or Braille format.
The 13th National Cricket tournament for the blind will be played in Bangalore from March 1 to 5, 2006. Teams from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Orissa and Jharkhand will be participating. These are the winners and runners up teams from the four zonal tournaments held earlier in the season.
Universities are likely to allow visually impaired students the option of writing answer papers for examinations on computers. This would do away with the age-old system of students using a ‘scribe’ during examination.
In a letter to all universities, including deemed universities, the University Grants Commission (U.G.C.) has taken note of a request in this regard from the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (C.C.P.D.), and requested universities to take ‘necessary action in the matter’ and bring it to the notice of colleges affiliated to it.
Chicago based Chase Bank has installed a fully accessible, state-of-the-art A.T.M. at the Chicago Lighthouse, 1850 W. Roosevelt Rd.—the first A.T.M. at the site. Chase Bank and Chicago Lighthouse are partnering to train visually impaired people on using A.T.M's.
The bank has donated up to 300 sets of earphones, which the Chicago Lighthouse has been distributing. The earphones can be used at any accessible A.T.M.
Back in October 2005, eyeNews reported on Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) EDUSAT project in Gujarat that gave visually impaired people a chance to access the latest information. The good news is that this system has got into wider usage. The modern technology involving satellite and digital equipment enabled over 2,000 students at 10 blind schools across Gujarat to revise subjects such as mathematics, science, hindi and social studies before the board examinations.
Like many colour-blind people who have adapted all their lives to a particular way of seeing things, Harry Rogers feels his inability to discern red and green hasn't caused him much trouble over the years. Even so, there is one particular difficulty, making sense of charts, graphs, weather maps and other colourful material on his computer screen.
Now, eyePilot, software will enable colour blind people such as Rogers to navigate the Internet.
Disability Rights Commission (D.R.C.), U.K., has called upon disabled internet users to rise up against inaccessible website owners and help it take complaints with the force of law. The step from D.R.C. followed the launch of new guidelines to amend the limitations in Website Accessibility Initiative, set up by the World Wide Website Consortium. New guidelines on how to make websites user-friendly for disabled people have been developed by the British Standards Institution. The initiative was sponsored by the D.R.C. after an investigation in April 2004.
Mayra Ramirez is blind. She knows she's never going to drive. She can think of a lot of things she'd rather be studying than rules of the road, but she didn't have a choice. Blind students in Chicago, U.S.A. wonder why city schools make them take driving course.
Chicago public schools requires all sophomores (pre-college) to take the class and pass a written road-rules exam--a graduation requirement that affects about 30 blind and visually impaired students in specialised programmes.
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