| Description of good practice: |
When an individual’s primary disability is visual, his/her visual needs must be carefully evaluated in order not to underestimate the impact of the impairment on his/her daily life – especially in case of educational contexts – so that the AT solution can be rightly accommodated to them.
Several types of measurements are employed to assess visual capability: visual acuity, visual range, visual tracking (following a target), and visual scanning (finding a specific visual target in the field of several targets).
Vision loss or vision impairment can result from a variety of causes (diseases, trauma, and problems at birth...) that can lead to varying degrees of vision loss from total blindness to affected eyesight in one eye only. As Scherer refers, different degrees are described as partially sighted, low vision, legally blind, or totally blind: “It is important to note that as the
vision loss becomes more complete, the individual typically needs to use more assistance as well as high-tech and complex technologies for reading, writing, and mobility.”
Simple AT solutions:
A lot of special toys and games exist to support play and development of a visually impaired child. Almost any common board game is available in the enlarged format. There are also enlarged and tactually labelled playing cards, as well as Braille versions of common board games, dice, and computer games emphasizing text and sounds rather than graphics.
The process of studying mathematics and algorithms requires the use of technical aids to learn the numbers in Braille and to set them up in columns. Talking watches are used by blind individuals, but Braille watches exist, too. There are portable devices that read paper money and voice the denomination of the bill. Traditionally the blind used the Braille code for reading and writing, and many special tools have been developed to support their studies with Braille. The development and spreading of the PCs have changed this trend greatly.
Learning to use the computer:
Learning to use a computer is a long and difficult route for a blind person, but building a totally autonomous life is considered a must, not only by rehabilitation experts but by the communities of blind people, too. The most effective software for blind children is still written to run under DOS, so old PCs can be used; a student does not have to learn DOS rules and commands, a technician skilled in DOS and capable of solving would-be problems must be at hand instead.
Children might not have comprehensive knowledge of the computer to start the school curriculum, though for their future a well-formed specific training is needed, since this tool is likely to become their most important working instrument.
The advent of Graphical User Interface (GUI) has created particular problems for blind computer users. In GUI visual information indicating relative spatial positions of objects on the screen becomes highly significant. Interaction is mediated by a mouse, however for a blind person it is almost impossible to use it and to know where it is pointing. GUIs
have been made accessible via the development of screen readers, which essentially translate the screen into speech pronounced by a synthesizer. |
