[accessibleimage] Fw: BlindNews: Pictures for the hands

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    I thought this would be of interest.

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Robert Jaquiss

----- Original Message ----- From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 7:51 PM
Subject: BlindNews: Pictures for the hands


Carroll County Times, Maryland USA
Sunday, August 06, 2006

Pictures for the hands

By Justin Palk, Staff Writer

Sunday, August 06, 2006

BALTIMORE - Hands were everywhere - running over telescopes and lenses, plaster models of the moon's surface, even over photographs of stars, galaxies and the moon.

It was a hands-on astronomy lesson the Westminster Astronomical Society held for students who are blind, part of a greater effort by the National Federation of the Blind to make science, math and technology classes more accessible and attractive to blind students.

"How does our galaxy look?" 14-year-old Edgar Gonzalez of Salt Lake City asked at one point during the class.

"I don't know," replied 13-year-old Karen Arcos of Los Angeles.

Later in the session, when one of the Westminster Astronomical Society volunteers passed around a tactile image of the M101 spiral galaxy, which has a similar shape to our own Milky Way, Arcos held it against her chest, as she ran her fingers over the bumpy black and white image.

"Yeah, see, it's like a spiral that gets smaller and smaller," she said.

Although people had sometimes explained to her how the sky looks, she'd never had the opportunity to do any astronomy before, Arcos said.

Being able to feel the images beneath her fingers isn't an opportunity she often gets, and it's useful, she said.

"You can see if [the] explanations match up with what you imagined," Arcos said.

Volunteers from the Westminster Astronomical Society used digital cameras attached to telescopes to take pictures of the moon, Jupiter and a four-star formation called the "Double Double", which they then inverted - turning black areas on the picture white and white areas black.

When the images are transferred to specially-coated swellform paper and run through a swellform printer, the dark spots on the paper are raised slightly above the white background, resulting in a tactile image that can be felt as well as seen.

It's been done before - before the session started some stock images had already been printed on swellform paper in case the weather was bad.

To the best of anyone's knowledge, though, it had never been done live, with just a few minutes turnaround between the telescope and the printout getting to the students' hands, said Brian Eney, a society board member and one of the volunteers on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the live pictures were not as compelling as the event's organizers had hoped - a thin layer of high clouds made getting clear pictures difficult, although that ended up being just another part of the lesson, said Dave Gede, the Westminster Astronomical Society's president.

"It's one of the problems of this hobby," he said. "You're sort of at the mercy of the weather."

Blind children often get guided out of math, science and technology classes, said Mary Jo Thorpe, an education program specialist with the National Federation of the Blind.

For three years now, the federation's Jernigan Institute has been hosting summer science academies - of which Sunday's star party was a part - to try and get blind children interested in those subjects, she said.

Next year, the Jernigan Institute plans to team up with the Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering to host a youth slam featuring science, math, engineering and technology events for some 200 blind students, Thorpe said.

In addition to hosting the science academies and youth slams, the Federation has recently unveiled a new Web page for the National Center for Blind Youth in Science at www.blindscience.org, she said, which will eventually provide science resources for blind students and their parents and teachers.

Reach staff writer Justin Palk at 410-751-5909 or jpalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


http://www.carrollcounty.com/articles/2006/08/06/features/in_focus/focus1i.txt

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