[accessibleimage] 6 articles

Hi,
Sending six links to articles on the net. Mixed batch,
science, space, Perkins, film, music, and the out door life.
I have put the links first with text of the articles
following. 
Best,
Lisa

Links

Opening Blind Eyes to Science
http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=103422

Hands-On Book of Hubble Images Allows the Visually Impaired
to "Touch the Universe"
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2002/28/text/

These exhibits are made to be touched
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2004/11/15/these_exhibits_are_made_to_be_touched/

Uncommon Senses (film review)
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/137995/

Fingers do the talking for blind student's innovative music
teacher
http://english.www.gov.tw/index.jsp?id=14&recid=100745&viewdate=0

Braille and birch
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/entertainment/10214675.htm

Opening Blind Eyes to Science
 
A student at Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind and
STScI reads a braille map of Jupiter. NASA -- Steven and
Amelia are blind, yet both were able to read the temperature
with a thermometer and measure precipitation with a rain
gauge at a science camp this past summer. 

Their secret? 

Steven and Amelia, along with 10 other blind students ages
11-14, were using a talking thermometer, a Braille-marked
rain gauge and other tools identified by NASA for use by the
visually impaired. 

The tools got their first major test in July at the end of
the weeklong "Circle of Life" camp put on by the National
Federation of the Blind and sponsored by NASA. On the camp's
final day, students visited the pond and forest area of
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where
they made observations of the soil, vegetation, weather and
birds. 

For many of the kids it was the first time they had used
observation instruments specifically geared toward the
senses of sound and touch, rather than sight. 

"I didn't know they existed," said Steven, now a
ninth-grader at a science-oriented high school in New York.
"It was amazing to see the technology." 

Goddard soil scientist Elissa Levine has been leading NASA's
effort to introduce various blind-friendly gadgets to the
visually impaired community. Her work is aimed at making
activities such as GLOBE -- a NASA-sponsored science
education program in which K-12 students around the world
take measurements of soil, land cover, air, water and living
things -- more accessible to the blind. 

"I have been working with the GLOBE program for many years
and am aware of how effective it is as a learning
experience, which made me interested in seeing if it would
be as effective for blind students as well," Levine said. 

The new instruments include two kinds of talking
thermometers -- one for the air and a "meat thermometer"
that can be inserted into the soil. There's also a talking
compass and a talking sensor that analyzes soil color. A
graduated cylinder with a floating Styrofoam plug serves as
a rain gauge. The plug moves up or down depending on the
volume of water and is attached to a plastic measuring scale
marked with Braille. 

Unlike other sciences that are sometimes more abstract,
Earth science provides plenty of convenient opportunities
for interactive, nonvisual activities, such as listening to
birds or rubbing soil between one's fingers. 

"The best thing about Earth science is that there is a
natural laboratory right outside the classroom door," Levine
said. 

Promoting interest in science -- Earth or otherwise -- among
the more than 93,000 estimated blind school-age children in
the United States is as much about educating teachers as it
is kids, according to the camp's lead instructor, Robin
House, who says teachers often underestimate the potential
of blind students. 

"Many times blind students are left out of sciences and math
because some educators think, 'Oh, this is too difficult,
they couldn't possibly grasp these concepts,'" said House,
who herself is blind. "The idea of this particular camp was
a little bit of exposure in all the areas of science to get
kids going, 'I can do science, I can do it. I can become a
scientist if I want to.'" 

In the days preceding their visit to Goddard, the campers
dissected a dogfish shark and dug for dinosaur fossils at
the Maryland Science Center, explored seashells with blind
shell expert Geerat Vermeij, took a boat ride on the
Chesapeake Bay, and listened to sounds from space with blind
physicist Kent Cullers. 

The camp was the first step in the National Federation of
the Blind's initiative to create a National Center for Blind
Youth in Science. A second camp held in August -- "Rocket
On!" -- challenged blind high school students to develop,
build and launch a 12-foot rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight
Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore. 

For 12-year-old Amelia, the "Circle of Life" camp was a rare
chance to experience science up close and personal. 

"We don't usually get to have so much hands-on activities
when we're with a classroom. We have to touch stuff to be
able to know what they really are like," Amelia said. "There
are a lot of tools out there that blind people can use to
investigate science. Blind people can pretty much do
anything, but they just do it differently." 

In addition to having the right kinds of tools, House says
it is critical to the success of blind students that
educators help dispel misconceptions among sighted students
as to what blind people are capable of. 

"Sometimes it might take a little bit longer, maybe there's
a different way that the blind student has to go about doing
something," House said. "But that's what science is really
about anyway -- trial and error, trying things, taking
risks." 

Steven has a simple, straightforward message for both
students and teachers: 

"Blindness doesn't have to be a barrier. Being blind doesn't
stop you from having a brain and doing science." 





 Hands-On Book of Hubble Images Allows the Visually Impaired
to "Touch the Universe"

Full press release text:
  
A new book of majestic images taken by NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope brings the wonders of our universe to the
fingertips of the blind.

Called "Touch the Universe: A NASA Braille Book of
Astronomy," the 64-page book presents color images of
planets, nebulae, stars, and galaxies. Each image is
embossed with lines, bumps, and other textures. The raised
patterns translate colors, shapes, and other intricate
details of the cosmic objects, allowing visually impaired
people to feel what they cannot see. Braille and large-print
descriptions accompany each of the book's 14 photographs,
making the design of this book accessible to readers of all
visual abilities.

"I think this book will help the blind community to better
understand the variety of objects in space," explains the
book's author, Noreen Grice, operations coordinator for the
Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science.
"This book brings amazing celestial objects, seen with the
Hubble Space Telescope, to the fingertips of the visually
impaired, where they can better understand the universe and
their place within it."

NASA, which helped fund the book, and the book's publisher,
the Joseph Henry Press, trade imprint of the National
Academies Press (publisher for the National Academy of
Sciences), will publicly release "Touch the Universe" at 1
p.m., Thursday, Nov. 21, at press events at both the
National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, and at DePaul
University in Chicago.

"Touch the Universe" takes the reader on a cosmic journey,
beginning with an image of the Hubble Space Telescope
orbiting Earth and then traveling outward into the universe,
showing objects such as Jupiter and the Ring Nebula. The
journey ends with the Hubble Deep Field North, an image
revealing thousands of galaxies billions of light-years
away. The book costs $35. Orders can be placed online at
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10307.html or by calling
1-888-624-8373.

Grice collaborated with Bernhard Beck-Winchatz, an
astronomer at DePaul University in Chicago, to develop the
book with a $10,000 Hubble Space Telescope grant for
educational outreach. Beck-Winchatz had received the grant
from a program administered by the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore.

The DePaul astronomer got the idea for the book while
browsing through a museum gift shop where he saw Grice's
original book, "Touch the Stars," a 1990 astronomy book
containing tactile line drawings of objects such as
constellations, planets, and galaxies.

"I thought that Noreen's book 'Touch the Stars' was a
wonderful idea, especially because astronomy is thought of
as a visual science," Beck-Winchatz explains. "At the same
time, when I saw the book and her sketches, I thought there
was so much more we could do. I thought it would be
intriguing to create similar tactile pictures based on real
Hubble Space Telescope images."

He contacted Grice about making the Hubble Space Telescope
photographs accessible to the blind. She was eager to take
up the challenge. For 18 years, Grice had been making
astronomical pictures accessible to the blind. Her
involvement with the blind community began when visitors
from the Perkins School for the Blind arrived for a show at
the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston.

"I didn't know what to do," Grice recalls. "I hadn't thought
that blind people would be interested in astronomy. After
the show I asked them how they enjoyed the astronomy program
and they said, 'It stunk.' After that I thought, 'What went
wrong? Why did they have such a negative experience? I
realized that the planetarium's celestial images were not
accessible to people who could not see them and decided to
do something about it."

Working in the kitchen of her home, Grice made prototypes of
the Hubble images for "Touch the Universe" by tracing them
on plastic sheets, using tools to create raised details.
Grice not only tried to represent the outlines of stars,
planets, and galaxies, she also used consistent patterns to
denote color and matter. Raised lines, for example,
represent blue. Rings are illustrated with dotted lines, and
wavy ones signify gas currents.

She sent the prototypes to students at the Colorado School
for the Deaf and Blind in Colorado Springs, who evaluated
each image for clarity and provided suggestions for
improvement. Grice then traced the final illustrations onto
metal plates and placed them in a heat vacuum machine to
create multiple copies of molded plastic pages. The pages
became the first prototypes of her book.

Benning Wentworth III, a science teacher at the Colorado
school who arranged for the book's evaluation, says the
biggest challenge was making the complex Hubble images
simple enough to understand by touch. "The fingers of a
blind person must move in order to transmit information to
the brain," Wentworth explains. "Where a sighted person
takes a look at an image as a whole and then breaks it down
into its parts, the blind person must take the parts and
make it into a whole."

The key ingredient in creating this unique book was the
partnership between a teacher, a scientist, and a
planetarium educator.

"I hope that the project's success will inspire others to
become creative, because it is very gratifying for
scientists to use part of their research grant for an
education project, whether it is for the blind community or
for middle schools," Beck-Winchatz says. "There are 10
million visually impaired people in the United States. I am
thrilled that these amazing resources for studying the
universe are now available to them."

The finished product has certainly delighted Wentworth's
students. "What is unique about this book is that it is
taking actual photographs and bringing them to life for
blind students," he says.

Release Date: 12:00AM (EST) November 21, 2002 
Release Number: STScI-2002-28

Contact:


Don Savage
NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/358-1547; E-mail: dsavage@xxxxxxxxxxx)

Mark Hess
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-8982; E-mail: mhess@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

Donna Weaver
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
(Phone: 410/338-4493; E-mail: dweaver@xxxxxxxxx)

Robin Pinnel
Joseph Henry Press/National Academy of Sciences, Washington,
DC
(Phone: 202/334-1902; E-mail: rpinnel@xxxxxxx)

Roxanne L. Brown
DePaul University, Chicago, IL
(Phone: 312/362-8623; E-mail: rbrown11@xxxxxxxxxx) 




These exhibits are made to be touched
At Perkins School for the Blind,new museum is accessible to
all
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff  |  November 15, 2004

WATERTOWN -- What's the least-known world-famous institution
in Greater Boston?
  
A prime candidate would be the Perkins School for the Blind.
Thanks to its most celebrated alumnae, Helen Keller and her
teacher Annie Sullivan, Perkins long ago earned an
international reputation. Yet how many people know anything
more about it?

Perkins, which is celebrating the 175th anniversary of its
founding, hopes to do something about that. A new museum
devoted to the school's history opens to the public
tomorrow.

''We're very excited about it," says Steven M. Rothstein,
Perkins's president. ''It's very important to have the
legacy on display."

The museum is located in a handsome two-story concourse in
the Howe Building, the major landmark on campus. Drivers on
the Massachusetts Turnpike know the building as the gray,
neo-Gothic tower visible on the other side of the Charles
River.

The museum looks much as one might expect any gallery space
to look: display cases, photographs, interactive computer
stations, objects of historical interest.

On closer examination, two key differences emerge. The
display cases aren't glassed in, and inside each case is a
flat white surface about waist high. The surfaces look to be
bases for yet-to-be-installed objects. In fact, the surfaces
are there to offer Braille explanatory texts. At the Perkins
museum, touching is a form of seeing.

''One of the issues we had to address was knowing there
would be several kinds of visitor," explains Bob Segal, an
independent museum designer who helped set up the displays.

The museum is conscious of needing to serve not just sighted
visitors but also those who are blind, deaf-blind, visually
impaired, or otherwise handicapped.

''To reach everybody so this was accessible to all visitors
was a real challenge," Segal says.

Segal, who's done exhibits for such institutions as the
Worcester Art Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, found
setting up the Perkins displays to be more liberating than
daunting.

''We're doing things a fine-arts museum would cringe at.
We're using fluorescent lighting. We have objects out in the
open -- to touch as well as see. Always we come back to the
same question: Is it a teaching object or a fine-arts
object?"

''Teaching" was the invariable answer, but that doesn't
gainsay the great beauty of many of the objects. They range
from the pocket watch of Samuel Gridley Howe, the school's
first director and the Howe Building's namesake, to a dozen
Braillers, typewriters whose keys substitute Braille dots
for letters.

A text on Euclidean geometry from the mid-19th century has
the diagrams sewn in, so students could ''read" them with
their fingers. Chess and checker sets include gridded
surfaces to let blind players keep track of their pieces.
Perhaps the most memorable item is a self-standing globe
with raised surfaces. Dating from 1837, it's more than four
feet in diameter and incorporates some 700 pieces of wood.

Further complicating Segal's job has been the fact the
museum is not a discrete part of the building. It also
functions as a corridor, with displays lining the sides of
the space.

''They used the hall the whole time we were working on it,"
says Betsy McGinnity, the school's coordinator of
information services. ''Usually, Bob's worked in galleries
closed to the public. This one wasn't, which meant he got to
hear people's opinions as he was setting things up."

''Yeah," Segal says with a laugh, ''I'd hear both sides:
cursing and complimenting."

Segal's having to work in public led to one of his happiest
moments doing the installation. It involved his building a
three-dimensional map of the school.

''When the kids could touch the map and visualize the
campus," he says, ''they'd break out into big grins. And
that was just great."

The Perkins School for the Blind is at 175 North Beacon St.,
Watertown. The school's museum is located in the Howe
Building. It's open to the public Tuesdays and Thursdays
from 2-4 p.m. and to groups by appointment. For information
call 617-972-7767.


Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@xxxxxxxxxx 


Uncommon Senses 

Casting blind or deaf actors may be relatively standard in
Europe and the United States, but it hadn't been done much
in Russia, until now. 

By Tom Birchenough
Published: November 19, 2004 

Setting a film in a home for the blind, deaf and dumb might
sound like a recipe for yet another bleak, moralizing
post-Soviet film, but Roman Balayan's "Bright is the Night"
is an exception to the rule. Social commentary is simply not
something the veteran Armenian-born, Ukrainian-based
director does. If anything, "Bright is the Night" resembles
his costumed 1995 adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's "First
Love," with its lush pastoral setting and atmosphere of slow
but unoppressive decay, and its understated treatment of the
emotions that connect a small number of characters in close
proximity. It's summer, and the majority of residents are
away from the institution, leaving just a handful of staff
and patients on the premises.

The main player is a young therapist, Alexei, played by
Andrei Kuzichev, who was seen earlier this year in a
supporting role in Vladimir Mashkov's "Papa." Though
obviously devoted to his profession and to those he looks
after, he has plenty of extra time during the summer months
for wandering the forests and fishing in the lake with the
institution's janitor, an amiable drunk named Petrovich
(Vladimir Gostyukhin).

  
But Alexei's idyll is turned upside down with the arrival of
an attractive medical resident, Lika, played by another
relative newcomer, Olga Sutulova, whom he first encounters
sunbathing in the nude and later discovers to share his
enthusiasm for engaging patients by kindling their emotions
for each other. Needless to say, Lika and Alexei's new-age
therapeutic techniques raise the hackles of the institute's
more traditional-minded director, Zinaida (Irina Kupchenko),
as does their growing romantic involvement. Zinaida has long
felt affection for Alexei, while rejecting the advances of
the institution's other therapist, Dima, played by Alexei
Panin.

If that sounds like a prelude to a major dramatic crisis, it
isn't. Instead, the film is dominated by slow interactions
between the therapists and their patients, through Braille
and a kind of sign language made of hand and body contact.
These scenes are made all the more effective for the fact
that the amateur actors playing the patients are themselves
either blind, deaf or dumb. Such versimilitude has become
reasonably standard for Europe or the United States in
art-house films, but is extremely rare in Russia to date.

Moving moments do emerge, particularly in the interactions
between Alexei and Vitya, a young boy whose arrival at the
institute precipitates the film's denouement -- if that's
what the final scene can be called, given that the
revelations themselves can't be spoken out loud. Climbing
trees and running through the fields with Vitya, Alexei
reaches the stage, crucial to his method, when he feels that
his combination of touch and body sign language has allowed
him to "hear" the voice of the child. Once that bond is
established, Alexei is too devoted to abandon the lad, even
if that means abandoning his love.

Production values are modest, and certainly reflect the
limited funds available to this Russian-Ukrainian
co-production. But cinematographer Bogdan Verzhitsky does a
great deal with the assets he has. At a nighttime open-air
dance scene toward the end, his camera centers on two
patients who have obviously responded to Alexei's treatment
and found emotional engagement with each other, contrasted
with close-ups of eye contact between the other characters
who have not.

The paradox with "Bright is the Night" -- a film that will
catch some international attention, given the reputation of
its director and his co-screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov --
is how little interest it will provoke among Russia's
multiplex-going viewers today. The small late-afternoon
audience with whom this critic watched the film was
dominated by people well into their 40s, who responded well.
Most likely, Balayan's film will find its place on a
mainstream television broadcast sometime in the future,
where it will appeal greatly to those viewers -- Soviet-era,
yes -- for whom a trip to the cinema is no longer a
possibility.

"Bright is the Night" (Noch Svetla) is playing in Russian at
Dom Khanzhonkova. 

Copyright © 2004 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
 


Fingers do the talking for blind student's innovative music
teacher
Date:  2004/11/18 11:26:14
SOURCE:  Liberty Times

Music teacher Lin Pei-yun uses blind student Chang
Lin-feng's fingertips as the mouthpiece of a clarinet,
gently touching them with her own tongue so that her student
can correctly understand the technique of "tonguing" or
separating notes on the clarinet. Because of this unique
"tactile tongue teaching method," Chang was able to perform
in a technically accurate way for the first time during his
freshman year of college. His technical prowess has advanced
rapidly, and today he plays the clarinet professionally. 

When Chang Lin-feng was just four months old, a fever caused
him to lose his eyesight. He says that he has absolutely no
memory of visual images at all. Although he has the
misfortune of losing his eyesight, Chang says contentedly
that he is thankful the high fever did not damage his brain
or nervous system, so that today he can count on a healthy
brain and four good limbs. 

When Chang was a student at Chi-ming High, he became
fascinated by the clarinet. An older student helped him to
learn to play, and in 1995 Chang passed the entrance
examination for Fujen Catholic University's department of
music. Music teacher Lin Pei-yun discovered with surprise
that this visually handicapped student was playing with
totally incorrect technique, which was a major blow to
Chang's self-confidence. 

"Teaching Chang was as tiring as teaching three other
students," remembers Lin. Chang was the first
visually-handicapped student she had ever taught, and not
only was Chang unable to model himself on his teacher's
posture and position, after he began his university studies
the need to completely overhaul his technique caused even
greater difficulties. For his teacher, the most challenging
thing was that when tonguing, Chang was unable to produce a
short yet strong tone. 

One day, Lin had an inspiration. During Chang's lesson, she
first washed his hands carefully and then placed his fingers
into the form of a clarinet reed. She then used her own
tongue to produce "tongued notes" as she would on her own
instrument. This allowed Chang to feel the accurate
technique. Because of this breakthrough, he has been able to
develop into the excellent performer he is today. 

Under Lin's careful tutelage, Chang developed his musical
career. On December 26, he will hold a recital entitled
"Image and Romanticism: A Dialogue" at the Taiwan Cement
Building. Chang hopes to have more opportunities in the
future to perform at events like World Vision's "30 Hour
Famine". 




 Posted on Fri, Nov. 19, 2004 
  
 
  
 I M A G E S   
 
SPECIAL TO THE STATE  
Eight Braille-encoded signs are located on the trail. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Braille and birch

Trail opens a section for those who don?t need vision to see

By JOEY HOLLEMAN

Staff Writer


SPARTANBURG ? ?I like it because stuff is crunchy.?

Nicky Weilacher?s impression of the newest section of the
Palmetto Trail might seem unusual to most people, and that?s
the whole point. The special ¾-mile ribbon of crushed rock
through the campus of the S.C. School for the Deaf and Blind
brings the sensual world of trail hiking to people who
seldom enjoy the experience.

Nicky, like many of the students at the school, is blind.
The bubbly 11-year-old usually sticks to hard surfaces,
where footing is constant and her cane is more effective.
For feet accustomed to cement or tile floors, walking on the
crushed rock of the trail offers the same sort of relaxing
vacation that hiking under a blue sky does to a sighted
9-to-5 office worker.

The mat of fall leaves on the trail, while a distraction for
a cane, accentuated the ?crunchiness? on a bright November
morning.

?Everything is tactile for them,? said Mary Pope, a mobility
instructor who works with the students at the school. ?It?s
like they?re on all the time, analyzing their environment.?

The students who use the trail, which was finished this
month, listen for the traffic on nearby S.C.56 to see how
far away the road is. They feel the differences among the
crushed-rock trail, the metal border planted at ground level
and the grass on the other side of the border.

Some of the older students already have walked the trail
often enough to feel enough at home to stroll on it by
themselves. Youngsters such as Nicky and classmate Dalia
Green, a vision-impaired 11-year-old, must hike with
instructors.

?The reason we like this is because it relaxes them out
here,? Pope said. ?There?s no pressure. It?s wide. There?s
no drop-off. They can come out here and socialize.?

The trail has been set up as a multifaceted learning
experience. In addition to learning about mobility in
different settings, the students can stop at the eight
Braille-encoded signs. While working on their
Braille-reading skills, they discover that river birch trees
have bark that peels off in paper-like pieces and that white
oaks have egg-shaped acorns. Then they can take a few steps
off the trail to explore the trees.

The Palmetto Conservation Foundation, which coordinates the
cross-state Palmetto Trail, hopes to plant herbs near each
of the signs to heighten the sensual lessons, said assistant
director Yon Lambert.

When Lambert first approached school officials about the
possibility of linking the school with the statewide trail,
they were skeptical, said school president Sheila
Breitweiser. She loved the concept, but she didn?t want
strangers walking through a campus filled with children.

As a compromise, the trail runs along the front of the
campus beside a running track already open to the public.
The only nearby building is the guard house at the entrance.

Breitweiser loves the way it turned out.

?It gives our children the opportunity to enjoy their
environment as freely as possible,? she said.

A few other public nature trails in the state offer Braille
signs, but none was built with the idea that vision-impaired
people would be the most frequent hikers.

Of course, anyone is welcome to check out this Palmetto
Trail segment. It will serve as the southern terminus for
the Hub City Connector, a proposed 12-mile series of trails
through Spartanburg to USC Upstate on the other side of
town.

When the entire 425-mile Palmetto Trail stretches from the
ocean to the mountains ? the goal is to have it done by 2010
? people on the quest to hike the entire length likely will
remember this section. If they?re lucky, they?ll run into
somebody like Nicky, who can teach them a thing or two about
viewing the world from a different perspective.

As Dalia helped Nicky read the Braille on one of the signs,
they kept moving back and forth over a long set of bumps.
They never had encountered the Latin words in the scientific
name for bald cypress, ?Taxodium distichum.?

?That?s a handful,? Nicky said.

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366 or jholleman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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