Computing
This printer makes ‘visual’ aids for people with sight problems
A physicist’s blindness inspired touchable and talking graphs, charts and maps
A computer can read aloud as someone touches different parts of a raised-dot diagram. The text can be read in braille, too.
ViewPlus Technologies, Inc
Share this:
Maybe you’ve heard the saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It means that some information is best conveyed visually. And that’s especially true in many research fields, says electrical engineer Dan Gardner.
But what if you can’t see?
Dan’s dad learned firsthand just how hard some science work can be when he could no longer see pictures, graphs or other visual displays of his data.
John Gardner was a solid-state physicist at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis. His job involved using “the properties of the nucleus [of an atom] to learn something about the solid [state]” of materials, he explains. For many projects, he and his team added tiny bits of radioactive impurities — think of them as tags — to different solids [...]