Lesson No. 1 on Celia Chacon's television cooking show — use what you have, find substitutes for what you don't.

Except this food TV host isn't just talking ingredients. She's teaching viewers to use touch, smell and sound instead of sight. That's because her viewers are mostly listeners. Like Chacon, most are blind or visually impaired.

Can you visualise blind children learning tap dancingto perfection? This is exactly what one-time TV actor Kumar Bhatia hasdone in his forthcoming film 'Seven'. And he has signed on seven kidswho are actually visually challenged.

'It's an idea turned into afilm that I lived and worked with for four years,' said Bhatia, whoplayed a junkie in Doordarshan's soap 'Subah'.

Working in a food-service job means attention to customers, assembling orders properly and keeping things clean, and doing these tasks requires extra effort if the worker is blind or visually impaired. Three teenagers from the Kentucky School for the Blind are operating Kingdom Sub on weekdays at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom for four weeks as part of the school's Summer Career and Work Program.

Marissa Chambers, Mitch Saylor and Samantha Hubbard are working from 11 a.m. to3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday today through July 18. They also worked June 16-27.

British researchers have developed a robotic pen that they say may enable blind people to write clearly and consistently.

All that one will have to do to use McSig – as the “force-feedback” pen has been named – is to gently guide one’s hand.

Stephen Brewster, an expert at the University of Glasgow, says the system uses an off-the-shelf haptic device by US-based SensAble Technologies, called the Phantom Omni – a stylus mounted at the end of a motorised arm, which is capable of moving and resisting movement in three dimensions.

In an effort to unlock the untapped potential of visually-challenged children and to make available Braille literature on science and astronomy, which are pretty rare to find, city-based Planetary Society of India (PSI), has launched a Braille newsletter aptly titled Chandrayaan, India’s first unmanned moon mission.

To most of us, the piano is some kind of magical mystery box. You sit down and play, and what comes out represents perfect precision in sound.

Each key does exactly what it's supposed to do, sounds exactly the way it's supposed to sound in relation to its neighbors, and the whole is a thing of mathematical beauty (skill of the player notwithstanding, of course).

Piano technicians know differently.

"People think you just sit down and make music," said Mark Burbey, a student at the School of Piano Technology for the Blind in Vancouver's Hudson's Bay neighborhood.

At first look, 52-year-old Khairul Bashar would pass off as any another candidate trying his luck in the Lok Sabha polls.

But there is something special about this candidate which makes him different from others in the rat race.

Bashar, who is making a debut in electoral politics by contesting as an independent from Azamgarh parliamentary constituency, is visually challenged and physically impaired.

Elections in India are all about inclusion, the right to vote for all citizens of a certain age.
 
And this means that people with disabilities, including those who are visually impaired cannot be left out.
 
A training session in Bhopal has a huge turnout. And why not? For the first time ever, our polling booths will have ballot papers in Braille.
Voters are being trained in advance, so that on the D-Day they need no assistance.