[accessibleimage] Fw: Cosmic Journey


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On 2/02/2005 at 10:42 AM Barbara! <denbar2@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Gazette, Colorado Springs
Monday, January 31, 2005
Cosmic Journey
By BILL RADFORD - THE GAZETTE
Blind people can see, Ben Wentworth says.
Just not with their eyes.
"The eyes are only giving your mind input, which your mind then takes
and 
converts
into usable information for you," says Wentworth, a former teacher at
the 
Colorado
School for the Deaf and the Blind in Colorado Springs. "With the
totally 
blind student,
once they get a picture in their mind's eye, they see it just as
clearly
as 
you and
I do."
And so Terry Garrett, a blind student, can see the patchwork of stars 
twinkling in
the night sky without lifting his eyes to the sky. He can see other
worlds 
without
peering through a telescope.
He can see all this in his mind's eye thanks to innovative books that
make 
astronomy,
largely thought of as a visual science, accessible to the blind and
visually 
impaired.
They are books he and others at the Colorado School for the Deaf and
the 
Blind had
a hand in developing.
A few years ago, students evaluated images for "Touch the Universe: A
NASA 
Braille
Book of Astronomy," which combined photos from NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope 
with
tactile overlays. The overlays' lines, bumps and other textures allow
the 
blind to
feel what they can't see, to provide a way for those images to reach
the 
mind's eye.
More recently, students evaluated images for "Touch the Sun," which
will
be 
published
this spring. Transparent textures bonded to the photos translate
swirling 
gas patterns,
dark sunspots and other solar features for the blind. Both books
incorporate 
Braille
and large-print descriptions of the photos.
"Being a student who is totally blind and who has never seen the stars 
before, to
have these pictures in tactile form is really a great experience,"
Garrett, 
17, says.
"I can actually get an idea of what is up there."
Noreen Grice wrote both books, as well as the earlier "Touch the
Stars," 
which used
raised line drawings to bring the cosmos to the blind.
Grice, of Connecticut, is president of You Can Do Astronomy, a design
and 
consulting
company intent on making astronomy and space science accessible to
people 
with disabilities.
She's also operations coordinator for the Charles Hayden Planetarium at
the 
Boston
Museum of Science.
She became interested in opening the world of astronomy after students
from 
a nearby
school for the blind attended a show at the planetarium. Grice, then an

intern at
the museum, asked the students what they thought of the show. "They
said
it 
stunk
and walked away."
She realized the show, a visual exploration of the night sky, held
little 
for the
blind students. A few days later, she visited the Perkins School for
the 
Blind. She
found thick Braille books on astronomy at the school's library, but no
books 
with
pictures, no books that brought astronomy to life for the blind.
"At that point, I thought, 'I am going to do something about this.' "
Her "Touch the Stars," now in its fourth printing, was published in
1990.
It 
inspired
Bernhard Beck-Winchatz, an astronomer at DePaul University in Chicago,
to 
approach
Grice about an astronomy book that would appeal to the sighted and 
nonsighted with
photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Grice welcomed the idea, but knew she would need help. "I said, you
know 
what, we
need someone to evaluate images and I know the right person."
That person was Wentworth, who had contacted Grice about his plans for
a 
tactile
planetarium at the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind.
Wentworth's students evaluated all of the "Touch the Universe" images.
They 
judged
some confusing, with too many textures or too little explanation.
Grice axed some images and revised others, some more than once. After
"Touch 
the
Universe," she and Beck-Winchatz turned to Wentworth again for "Touch
the 
Sun." The
three are now planning a book that will view space through different 
wavelengths
of light.
Wentworth retired from the classroom in 2003, but still is a consultant
and 
remains
active in the push to make science more accessible to the blind.
"Society for so long has been attuned to the idea that blind people are

invalids,
that they can't do anything. People make the blind invalids because
they 
don't allow
them to do anything."
Grice points to blind physicist and astronomer Kent Cullers, director
of 
research
and development at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Institute, 
as an
example of what blind people can do.
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0272 or
comics@xxxxxxxxxxx
www.gazette.com/display.php?secid=17
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