Apr 2012 - Retina India.

April 2012 | Welcome to Retina India.

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Welcome to Retina India. All about Retina, for those with an interest in Retina & Retinal Ailments.

April 2012

Honorary Editor: Giridhar Khasnis

April 2012

“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” - Helen Keller -

C O N T E N T S: 1. Drawing without optics: by Pranav Lal 2. New App to Assist VI Students in Maths (thanks to Jenna Gorlewicz) 3. Portrait of an achiever: Kartik Sawhney 4. Miscellany: Revealing statistics about blind in India New Govt. department to look after differently abled Scholarships for students with disability Loans to disabled persons for pursuing higher education An appeal by Xavier’s Resource Center for the Visually Challenged RI Bangalore Chapter meeting report DRAWING WITHOUT OPTICS PRANAV LAL feels that we now have an application, which blind people can use not only to create but also to edit and interpret diagrams. http://retinaindia.org/?page_id=1216

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For many, the very idea of a blind person perceiving pictures may be difficult to fathom. Even in the blindness community, people seldom believe that they have anything to do with graphics. This is largely true but the fact is that graphics allow you to perceive things in a completely different way as opposed to any other sensation. They allow you to incorporate spatial learning that is crucial in everything – from navigating safely across the road to knowing where to reach for the glass of water you kept five minutes ago. Moreover, the ability to both interpret and create diagrams is handy not only in an academic situation but also at the workplace, or for that matter, any ordinary circumstances. Think of a blind programmer, for instance, who has to create flowcharts for sighted colleagues. Or a blind couple planning their dream house – how do they put across their ideas to their architects and builders? Now, we have the tools that allow them to do so at no cost. Blind drawing history It has been possible for a long time for blind people to create graphics. Using a smooth rubber mat, a plastic embossing film (also known as German film) or Braille embosser, blind people can learn themselves to draw. They can also get creative by making cardboard cutouts. The problem with all of these approaches is that they do not scale well; also, it is not possible to edit the picture once it has been drawn. Along came Microsoft Logo (MSWLogo), a free multimedia version of UCBLogo, which was very popular in schools at one point of time. It allowed blind people to use commands such as line, turn left, turn right, etc. to draw pictures. They could even perceive the pictures by using programs such as the vOICe. Unfortunately, once they had created the picture, there was no easy way to edit it. Enter SVGDraw01 SVGDraw01 is an application created by Prof Richard G Baldwin (Ed: Prof Baldwin has written for the Retina India Blog: to read his article, please click here) at the Austin Community College. He wrote it for a blind student who was taking a physics course and needed to create diagrams. He has generously made it available to the community for free. SVGDraw01 allows blind people to specify coordinates and draw corresponding shapes by using mathematical concepts embodied in the Cartesian Coordinate System. Sighted users can also see the screen while the drawing is taking place. It uses scalable vector graphics that is XML-based standard for creating graphics. Unlike JPEG or bitmap files, scalable vector graphic files store commands that tell the computer what to do. For example, the first entry in the file could be to draw a line from zero, zero to 15, 27. This allows for very flexible rendering and since scalable vector graphics are XML, they can be easily edited. Unfortunately, not all people can edit them successfully. This is because the commands resemble computer programs; students and other professionals are thus burdened to learn a special language just to create a few pictures. http://retinaindia.org/?page_id=1216

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SVGDraw01 allows the user to specify what shape he or she wants to draw and to enter the coordinates that will allow the program to create that shape. For example, when you choose the line function, you can specify the starting and ending coordinates as well as the stroke width of the line. The same applies to rectangles and circles. In each case, the user is prompted for a series of values that gives the program enough information to create that shape. Once you have finished drawing or if you open a scalable vector graphics file for editing, you can get a list of shapes in a list box and can edit the values corresponding to that shape. It is possible to draw curves as well and specify that lines should be created at an angle of say 60 degrees from the horizontal. The program is highly accessible and will work with all major screen readers on Windows. SVGDraw01 is written in Java. Advance versions of SVGDraw01 include a number of facilities including the ability to select and view the attributes of any existing shape object without modifying the object; Ability to maintain original stroke width when scaling shape objects; and a checkbox for selecting all existing shape objects for rotation, translation, scaling, and deletion. It also allows creation of a “Home Base” concept. Each time you complete an action, you now return to the Home Base from which you can initiate other actions. Conclusion Thanks to Prof Baldwin, we now have an application, which blind people can use not only to create but also to edit and interpret diagrams. Additionally, for interpreting diagrams, there is the AudioTac feature which provides sonic and tactile representations of different shapes. A final point worth mentioning is that scalable vector graphics are being used increasingly across the World Wide Web. For instance, Wikipedia has most of its diagrams in this form. Therefore, the dark days of inaccessible images are behind us for good. Sources of more information Website of SVGDraw01 Website of the vOICe Website of the scalable vector graphics specification

33 year old Pranav Lal holds a degree in commerce from Delhi University (1999) and MBA from Indian Management Institute, New Delhi (2002). In 2000, he represented India at the Ability Olympics in Czech Republic. In 2001, he received an award for exceptional performance at the 6th Regional Abilympics, held in New Delhi. A techno-enthusiast, his current interests include sensory substitution, tactile graphics and machine vision; and writing on technology, education and accessibility. ~ NEW APP TO ASSIST VI STUDENTS IN MATHS JENNA GORLEWICZ says that people who really needed haptics were those with impaired vision because http://retinaindia.org/?page_id=1216

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they heavily rely on their sense of touch to ‘see’ the world around them. Haptic technology, or haptics, is a tactile feedback technology which takes advantage of the sense of touch by applying force, vibrations or, motions to the user. “When I began reading articles about haptic technology being incorporated into these new touchscreen devices, I realized that the people who really need haptics are people with impaired vision because they heavily rely on their sense of touch to ‘see’ the world around them,” says Jenna Gorlewicz, a graduate student in the Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory (MED Lab) at Vanderbilt University, USA. “I love math and I love teaching, so I immediately thought of using them for math education, because it has such a strong visual component.” After she did some research into the methods that are currently used to teach mathematics to the visually impaired, she became even more enthusiastic about her idea. Today Gorlewicz has developed and is testing a new Android app, one designed to assist visually impaired students in mastering algebra, geometry, graphing and other subjects that are particularly hard to comprehend without the aid of normal vision. The app is the brainstorm of Gorlewicz, and her adviser Robert Webster, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Given the enthusiastic reactions of students who are testing the app at local Hillsboro High School, it is believed that Gorlewicz’s innovation could have a major impact on how science, technology, engineering and math – the critical STEM subjects – are taught to the visually impaired. When she started the new project 18 months ago, the only off-the-shelf tablet that Gorlewicz could find that included tactile feedback was a $2,500 model produced for industrial and commercial applications. Since then haptic feedback has been added in a number of consumer tablets that sell for as little as $300. Gorlewicz has programmed these tablets so they vibrate or generate a specific tone when the student’s fingertip touches a line, curve or shape displayed on the screen. The devices can generate vibrations with a number of different frequencies and hundreds of different sounds. This allows Gorlewicz to assign different tactile or audio signals to different features. For example, in an exercise that includes an X-Y grid, she can set the horizontal and vertical lines to vibrate at different frequencies and set points to make a certain tone. In this way, it’s easier for the students to distinguish between the gridlines and the points on the grid. “If one of these tablets were networked wirelessly to the teacher’s computer, then, when he or she projects a graph or equation on the screen at the front of the class, the same graph would appear on the student’s tablet,” says Gorlewicz. “They could then use their senses of touch and hearing to follow the content the teacher is discussing.” “When Jenna first approached me with the idea, I thought it would be interesting and might be some small

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help,” says Ann Smith, a teacher of the visually impaired at Hillsboro High School in Nashville. “The more experience I have with it, the more valuable I think it could be. It makes the work more accessible. The students are really interested and they talk about it even when Jenna isn’t here.” Smith feels that such a tablet can be used by students with widely differing degrees of impairment because it combines visual, tactile and audio capabilities. According to Gorlewicz, every time she meets with the students, they come up with new features that they would like her to add. The configuration that they think would be the most useful is a touch-sensitive version of the graphing calculators that are widely used by their sighted classmates. Adapted, with kind permission of Ms. Jenna Gorlewicz. (Source) ~ PORTRAIT OF AN ACHIEVER This 17-year-old is an incredible achiever. He has not let his blindness get in the way of academic and other achievements. In class XI at Delhi Public School, New Delhi, Kartik Sawhney secured a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 10.0/10.0, equivalent to 95% marks in aggregate. He topped his school with A1 (91% and more) in all the six subjects, viz. English, French, Mathematics, Science, Social Science and Foundation of Information Technology. A computer freak, he attended to his entire schoolwork with the help of assistive technology. Kartik has many other accomplishments to his credit. National Talent Search Scholarship (2009); 1st All India Rank in the 8th National Cyber Olympiad (2008); Gold Medal in English Word Processing (15+ age category) at the 3rd National Abilympics; representing India at the 8th International Abilympics 2011, Seoul, South Korea; Gold Medal, Cadbury Bournvita Quiz Contest-Confidence Champion 2005; … and so on. A gifted singer, Kartik has performed on stage on several occasions. He visited Austria in 2007 as a member of the Global Children’s Choir for Peace, an Indo-Austrian Cultural Joint Venture. He is a Member and Child Right’s Ambassador of the Children’s Advisory Board of Plan India. He has also been involved as a Resource Person in the Computer Literacy Program of the National Association for the Blind, New Delhi. Kartik has secured the facility of alternate questions in lieu of visual inputs in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology in class XII CBSE Board Examinations with the support from Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged, Mumbai. His ambition is to pursue B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from a premier institute in the country, preferably Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Here is wishing Kartik many more laurels. ~ REVEALING STATS ABOUT BLIND IN INDIA

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There are 7.8 million blind people in India. The country accounts for 20 per cent of the 39 million blind population across the globe, of which 62 per cent are on account of cataract, 19.7 per cent refractive error, 5.8 per cent glaucoma and one per cent corneal blindness. Of the total blind population in the country, 4.7 per cent accounted for diabetic retinopathy and age related macular degeneration. A total of 285 million visually impaired were also present in the country, who had some form of impairment. Among the causes of blindness, many were curable if proper detection was done in time. While cataract was the most common cause, refractive error affects nearly 25 per cent of general population. Childhood blindness in India is 0.8/1000 children in