Computing for Near-Blind Children?

mjpaci asks: "One of my co-workers has a son, age 12, who is visually impaired among other problems. He is smart, charismatic, and funny--an all around good kid. Due to complications during his mother's pregnancy, he is near-blind. His father is a saint and spends many hours each night helping his child with homework. The problem is that the child is now taking Social Studies in junior high and has great trouble with geography as he cannot read the maps in the book even with his 'overhead visualizer.' Can Slashdot help me help this child?" "One of my clients has donated 21" monitors to him in the past and they have helped. The real rub is, even with the large monitors, the child cannot read maps when zoomed-in on. The father has looked to the end of the earth for good, hi-res maps that can be magnified without great pixelization. Are there any good sources out there for hi-res maps for educational purposes or a software package that could help? Questions like: Find the largest city on the Mississippi River and what is the Capitol of the South American country to the west of Surinam are hard for the child as his view of the map is very constrained."

Comments

Re:Not a handicap

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need geography - only missile coordinates.

Best Way to Help: Buy a Giant Relief Map

[reporter]

Sometimes technology marginalizes the blind. In the old days before graphical user interfaces (GUIs), a blind person could easily visualize what is on the screen of a line terminal with the assistance of a voice synthesizer stating the response from the computer. GUIs basically give too much information to be described verbally.

A similar problem exists here. Colorful, highly detailed maps on the computer are no use to the blind. What the father should do is to buy a giant relief map so the child can use this sense of touch to get a feel for each countries terrain.

As for the political boundaries, the father should use some glue to trace, with thick lines of glue, the outline of each country. The glue will solidify and will have a different texture from the relief in the relief map, and the kid can simply run his fingers along the thick glue-based traces. Here, glue means "Elmer's glue". It solidifies into a somewhat translucent rubbery consistency.

As a side note, the plight of this poor child is yet another example that a loving god simply does not exist. If god does exist, then it certainly cannot be loving. What loving god would allow such a tragedy to befall an innocent child? Remember the exodus story where god murders the first born sons (including babies) of the Egyptians? Get my drift?

Re:What makes Slashdot great

[cathouse]

I don't know anything about blindness, but do know something about being visipon impaired, 'cause I'm lucky to still be able to get 85% vision with my glasses/contacts.

My situation is roughly the same as described by previous poster, but there IS one thing that I am becoming more certain of as my visual abilities continue to decline: If your vision is poor and getting worse, it's time to think about NON VISUAL or at least LESS VISUALY CENTERED communication modes. I think that the GUI and specifically the misbegotten and perverse acultural and antiliterate fixation with ICONS is grossly destructive to technological society as a whole. Those with visual impairments are just the first to show the damage. I can deal with text comfortably at resolutions/magnifications far lower than the point where icons go from being just annoying to being both meaningless and madining. The single most critical factor in human progress prior to the web was when we dumped PICTURES for writing and adopted ALPHABETICAL NOTATION. The resulting explosive changes in both access to information and in quality/quantity of information are [at the least] the root/base for /. Don't let quibbling about how many Angels can dance on a pixel blind you to real factors that are essential to everyones clildrens'access to information. If you can do so without loading the question too much, ask the kid what works best. Maps just might not be a viable mode and if that's the case then you need to change the paradime.