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Computing for Near-Blind Children?

Posted by Cliff on from the geography-for-the-sight-impared dept.

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."

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Ever heard of BATS? by SmithG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This might be of interest to you. Not sure how visually impaired the kid is, but this is for those with no sight at all. BATS

    1. Re:Ever heard of BATS? by SmithG · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I suppose I'll elaborate a bit. BATS is a project that uses auditory clues and a pointing device (like a mouse) to let blind people explore maps. An example from this pdf says that you could have your cursor positioned with a large body of water just to the left, in which case the user would hear sounds of water and the name of the body coming from their left side (I suppose it requires stereo sound). It sounds pretty neat, and may be just what is needed for this kid. Not sure what the availability of maps for it is like, but you can download the software from the link I provided above. It's funny that this came up, because I had just heard some co-workers talking about BATS the other day (one of them had worked on it apparently). Anyway, hope this helps.