[accessibleimage] blind perspective of maps

Hi,
Another article about Rachel Magario.
Regards,
Lisa

http://cjonline.com/stories/122606/bre_blind.shtml
Blind student charting KU campus

The Associated Press
LAWRENCE -- From Rachel Magario's perspective, The University of Kansas campus is a complex grid of textures, scents and sounds, laboriously memorized and not easily set down on paper.
But mapping the campus in a way that will help other sight-impaired people navigate its buildings, hills and curving paths is just what Magario, a blind, 30-year-old graduate student from Brazil, has set out to do.
Magario is working with faculty and staff from the university's geography department and Cartographic Services Office to create campus charts and diagrams for the blind.
The goal is to translate her mental diagrams into tactile maps that use Braille and raised lines and symbols to indicate topographic features.
"If we could take Rachel's experience and make it easy for new students, then they could do in a year what took her two or three years to learn,” said associate professor George McCleary.
Blind since the age of six, Magario came to KU in 1997 as an international student and earned a bachelor's degree in 2004 in communications studies and geography.
Her initial impression of the campus was of a jungle -- lacking the orderly square blocks of her home city.
"It was more like a challenge,” Magario said of learning the paths and buildings. "The campus was not going to win me. I was going to win and learn every piece.”
She now navigates freely, relying partly on the textures beneath her feet: the carpet in the main corridor of Wescoe Hall's fourth floor, the patch of gravel to the side of the path from Watson Library to Blake Hall.
Those are sensations that sighted people might never notice. But they are critical to Magario's work with Robert McColl, former chairman of the university's geography department.
"Traditional map makers don't think the way that we do,” said Magario. "On a map, they try to exactly represent the size of the building to scale. For the blind person, it's more important to show the relationships between buildings, or the pathways or the roads, and not necessarily everything at once.”
For the project, McColl accompanies Magario to areas of campus to look at it from both of their perspectives. As McColl takes notes and observes, Magario talks about how she navigates an area, emphasizing the order of buildings or bus stops along a sidewalk or road.
There are differences in what Magario notices and what the terrain really looks like. A street may curve, for example, but "you feel that you're always walking straight,” she said. "You don't feel that you turn.”
Such discrepancies can be difficult to deal with when creating a document that is meant to help people get from one place to another.
If the map indicates a sharp turn, "it doesn't help me if I'm actually in the field,” Magario said. "It confuses me.”
The project, supported partly by a $5,000 grant from the KU Endowment to the Cartographic Services Office, will continue into the spring.

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