The Annual Transition Summit is just one of the ways the LightHouse supports blind and visually impaired individuals in finding employment opportunities. This year’s 4th Annual Summit will take place from Friday, April 30th to Sunday, May 2nd at Enchanted Hills Camp in Napa. While this event has been filled, to learn more about paid summer work experience opportunities for blind and visually impaired individuals contact Alrena Winn, Transition Employment Coordinator, at awinn@old.lighthouse-sf.org.

We asked Richard Rueda, LightHouse Director of Community Services, what to expect from this year’s 4th Annual Transition Summit. He says, “We’ll be tapping the expertise of a handful of successful working blind professionals to discuss their various paths to success and ways they have advocated for themselves. Participants will also learn more about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), followed by a meaningful role-playing activity for attendees to fully grasp how they can apply it to their daily lives. We will also continue the Summit tradition of preparing and learning best practices for the job interview process.”

Last but not least, the Summit will include a few fun activities such as a camp fire, hiking and a dance, before wrapping up the weekend with a recap of the information learned and a practical discussion of next steps.

If you have an interest in tactile maps, as Josh Miele does, or more to the point – simply getting around and accessing information – there is a lot to explore at CSUN and Josh is hitting it all: “Service Based Approach to the Construction and Delivery of Audio Tactile Diagrams”, “Crosswatch: A System to Help VI Pedestrians Find and Traverse Crosswalks”, “Tactile Maps of Montreal Subway Stations”, and “Audio-Tactile Interactive Computing with the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen”. The Quick Guide I was relying on didn’t provide many details, so when I apprised Josh that Livescribe was presenting he was like “Wha? I never heard about that. I’m their man. They should be calling me”. Turns out that this was Josh’s presentation. Doh!

A smartpen is a device with a small computer in it that writes on special paper and does two things ordinary pens can’t: It captures handwriting digitally and captures an audio recoding that is synchronized with the writing.

Josh and Steve Landau have developed a smartpen based system for producing tables, graphs, diagrams and other graphics in an audio-tactile form. Tactile can be over-cluttered. The more densely packed, the harder it is to interpret. More is less in the tactile world. Adding audio allows for much more complicated labeling than could be achieved with tactile alone. Adding a smartpen allows for even more functionality, elaborating on earlier tactile technologies.

With the smartpen there is no need for calibration (letting the computer know where it is), or sheet identification (a process you have to run through each time you change a sheet). At $150, it’s about a quarter the cost of existing systems. And the smartpen stands alone – it doesn’t need a computer or host device to work. Once the software is loaded onto it you can just run around with the pen in your pocket. It’s also much more accurate than using your finger, which is a lot bigger than the tip of the pen. Therefore the active areas can be much smaller, allowing you to do much finer granularity on the information that is provided on a tactile figure.

This is a technology developed in Sweden by a company called Anoto. The Pulse Smartpen is made in Oakland CA by a company called Livescribe. The pen has a computer built into it. It is a mainstream product developed for sighted college students to take notes with. They take notes in a notebook that is sold with the Livescribe pen. As they’re taking notes the pen is also recording the lecture as audio. When they go back later and tap on the notes in the notebook, it jumps to the spot in the recording when that note was written. Every page that you use with the pen is printed with a very high resolution field of black dots. The pattern of dots is unique for every spot of every page.  Because of the unique dot patterns the sensor in the tip of the pen is able to see where you are and react accordingly based on the program you loaded into the pen. Livescribe also provides a Software Developer Kit (SDK), so that other people can write applications for the Pulse smartpen.

Josh and Steve demonstrated a number of audio-tactile materials that they’ve developed:  a periodic table of the elements, a scientific calculator, a biology chart, and a sudoku. Continue reading Update from CSUN – part 3 →

With the idea that we’d glean some knowledge that would benefit the LightHouse’s foray into tactile cartography and graphics Shen and I attended “Service Based Approach to the Construction and Delivery of Audio Tactile Diagrams”. The PhD thesis of two lads from Dublin City University School of Computing, researchers Declan McMullen and Donal Fitzpatrick, the premise of their project is that “The conveying of graphical materials to visually impaired students has been difficult to achieve… If a learner is operating in a distance-learning environment, or cannot read Braille there is little to no access to graphical material.” And creating tactile graphics
tends to be time consuming and labor intensive. To answer this need, they’ve devised a server based model for, well… the Construction and Delivery of Audio Tactile Diagrams.

The culmination of years of concentrated effort and computing expertise, as a layperson catching a glimpse of their project for the first time a good deal of what they were describing went over my head, but as far as usability, for a teacher, say, needing to provide materials to a student, the process is straightforward. What I took away, in simplistic terms, is this: servers serve as the repositories of Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) images. There are also directories of content. The web-based interface lets the user wed images with content and generate any number of outputs including DAISY and Swell Paper. For example, you log on, search for a stock image (a map of the US, or human anatomy), search for content you wish to overlay (US Census Data, election results, the liver, etc.) and then apply the content and labels. Hit submit and an interactive graphic materializes on your computer. Clicking on a feature results in audio feedback revealing the nature of that item (“The capital of  California is Sacramento. The population of CA is 30 million…”). Image and content are given unique identifiers and are mapped to each other, so the original remains unmodified for future reuse. Pretty cool.  Users can also contribute images and content to share with others. Indeed, for such a system to be effective it will have to be adopted by many users. The challenge of proposing a new standard is that a significant majority must adopt it for it to become a standard. Aside from having to create a defensible thesis, other challenges will have to be sorted out or they will become problems. Calibration for instance. It’s one thing to generate a graphic on a screen, but output that is compatible wth a multitude of devices and methods requires calibration, because slight changes between formats can cause data to shift.  And there is the question of precision. A finger tip is sensitive, but not as accurate a pointer as a mouse cursor, which can target a very discrete location. Send the same graphic to be embossed and that tiny point may be too small for the finger to discern. There has to be a way to enlarge fine detail as you scale the diagram for tactile output. Still, all in all, fine work. Overall we’re very impressed.