Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute is a scientific laboratory for projects and ideas that are aimed at making the world more accessible to people who are blind. It's a place where ideas are born and research is conducted. Under the best conditions, those ideas are brought into reality, but sometimes an idea is born, research carried out, a new project or reality conceived, and nothing ever comes of it. Once the research is completed the task of the laboratory is completed, too. Smith-Kettlewell is not in the business of manufacturing or distributing products or providing tech support for new products once they have been launched.
This article will feature one Smith-Kettlewell idea that, regrettably, is still waiting after a decade for an outside entity to polish, package, sell, and support it, and another project that found just such a brilliant collaborator and is taking off in countless directions.
Mapping It Out
Dr. Josh Miele, a principal investigator and research scientist at Smith-Kettlewell, has always loved maps. Because he happens to be blind, that means he is a lover of tactile maps. At the beginning of the 21st century, Yahoo and Google began making visual maps readily available to sighted people. With a few keystrokes, you could see the visual image of roads leading from you to a point across town or five states away. All the streets were there with all their beautifully and sometimes convoluted intersecting points and you could plan routes while sitting in your living room. Why, Miele wondered, couldn't such maps also be available to people who are blind? And how could a map be easily produced that would put a picture into the hands of a person who is blind?
Tactile maps are sometimes a point of controversy among those who work in the fields of education and orientation for the blind. Miele's belief is that the only reason blind people sometimes fail to make sense of tactile maps is that there is no consistent language of map-making or map-reading to guide users through the process.
The information included on a tactile map and how that information is conveyed are largely dictated by the whims of each developer. Labeling can lead to clutter so that there is too much information for the sense of touch to assemble into a meaningful picture. What if tactile maps could be produced inexpensively, easily, and with simple conventions—What if every tactile map was produced according to the same rules: using embossed lines to represent streets, each ending in a short braille abbreviation, and an accompanying automated key to those abbreviation?
Ten years ago, Tactile Map Automated Production (TMAP) was born in the Smith-Kettlewell lab. Josh Miele wrote the software himself and imported map data shared by Mike May of Sendero Group LLC. The idea was beautifully simple. Enter an address, such as 123 Main Street, Smalltown, USA, and TMAP generates an embossable map, 11 by 11 inches, with the given address at its center, and all streets radiating from that point clearly indicated with braille labels. A second page containing a key to those labels is also generated as part of the file.
TMAP Unveiled
At the 2004 California State University at Northridge Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (CSUN), Josh Miele introduced TMAP. At that conference, people who were interested in the concept gaveMielea familiar address to enter into the software. "More than one person cried," Miele recalls, "when a picture they could see with their hands was put before them." Here were the streets and intersections they knew well, but with relationships made clearer by an instantly readable tactile representation.
The problem with TMAP was that once it was in place, the work of Smith-Kettlewell was finished. The San Francisco Lighthouse has adopted use of the system, so that students receiving orientation and mobility training from the Lighthouse are often provided with tactile maps of environments of interest to them, but otherwise, the software remains pretty much neglected.
"The site is there and the system is free for anyone to use," Miele explains. But not everyone owns a braille embosser and it takes a bit of instruction to learn to produce the maps. Smith-Kettlewell is simply not in the business of providing technical support. Miele's initial expectation was that some other entity would take on the project, possibly teaching others to use it or offering to provide maps on demand, but that hasn't happened. He is still open to working with anyone interested in picking up this idea.
The Talking Tactile Tablet
Meanwhile, another innovative project for bringing maps to life for blind people was being launched by Steve Landau, president and founder of Touch Graphics, Inc., in New York. The Talking Tactile Tablet (TTT) combines tactile drawings, placed on a "tablet" platform. Connected to a computer running its software, the TTT makes it possible for a blind person to explore a tactile representation and then hear audio explanations of the image being explored.
With the TTT and the company's adaptation of the National Geographic Atlas, for example, a blind person can examine embossed textured representations and hear audio explanations regarding land mass, population, etc.
An Idea Twin
Miele and Landau describe meeting the other as the sparking an instant dynamic rapport. Their mutual regard and admiration for one another is palpable. Each refers to the other as a genius (a label clearly deserved in both cases) and each recalls with energy the thrill of pitching ideas to one another in a brainstorming frenzy. Landau refers to Miele as a "soul mate," while Miele's term for Landau is "idea twin." The result of their collaboration is a flurry of amazing projects with the potential of changing the ways people who are blind or visually impaired interact with and access visual information.
Touch Graphics is exactly the kind of commercial entity or, as Miele refers to it, "technology transfer partner" Smith-Kettlewell needs. Touch Graphics is positioned to take research conducted at Smith-Kettlewell, fine tune it, and turn it into a packaged product. In 2007, both organizations were headed in a new direction with Josh Miele's discovery of the potential of a particular mainstream product.
Through a contact at LeapFrog, a leading manufacturer of educational toys, Miele encountered Livescribe. Essentially, Livescribe is a computer in a pen-like device with audio output and remarkable recognition capabilities.
Landau recalls a "salon" of sorts assembled by Miele at an Orlando conference, where he invited a group of people, including Landau, to his suite to demonstrate Livescribe."He had a tactile map of North America and this pen," Landau says. When the pen touched various points on the map, instant audio feedback provided information. Here was a commercial product with limitless possibilities for those who are blind or have vision loss, and Landau recalls being immediately both thrilled and horrified. Thrilled, he explains, by the possibilities, and horrified because it might be the end of his own product!
It wasn't the end of his own product, after all, but it very definitely marked the beginning of several innovative breakthrough projects. With the Talking Tactile Pen and a collection of tactile images, a person who is blind can touch clearly defined tactile images and then tap with the pen for additional audio information. Landau has created several amazing projects using this technology, some of which will be discussed in a future article.
The STEM Binder
The STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Binder, created by Touch Graphics in collaboration with Smith-Kettlewell and others, is a perfect introduction to the power of this audio-tactile combination.
The STEM Binderis a 3-ring binder filled with beautifully textured and colored representations of classic STEM images. The periodic table of elements, a human skeleton, a combustion engine, and several other images are ones familiar to sighted students of science and mathematics; they are also images that have been typically beyond the reach of students who are blind.
By tapping any point on an image with the Talking Tactile Pen, additional information is learned through audio output. Tap the textured image of one of the planets on the solar system page, for example, and the pen will announce in a clear male voice that this is Jupiter. Tap the image again, and you will hear that it is the fifth planet from the sun, the largest planet, and several other details. Tap it yet again, and you will hear how often it orbits the sun, its composition, and so on. A small chime is heard at the end of an audio explanation to indicate that there is another layer of information to be heard with another tap, and a kind of "clunk" sound indicates that you have now heard all the information available. In this way, an extensive amount of information can be provided to a student who is blind or visually impaired with a single tactile image. The pen has an internal speaker as well as a headphone jack, is charged via USB, and can be loaded with applications for use with other tactile images.
It is a truly amazing, portable, and powerful program that should be in any math or science classroom where a student who is blind studies.
BART Maps in San Francisco
One more project using this combination of tactile maps and audio output warrants mentioning. Smith-Kettlewell and the San Francisco Lighthouse have produced a collection of maps designed to familiarize residents and visitors with the 43 Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) stations. Each map consists of three pages, depicting the streets from which the station can be entered, the layout of the station itself, and the layout of the platforms where passengers board the trains. Details such as stairways, escalators, fare stations, and benches are included.
"There can be a lot of anxiety connected with planning a trip," Miele explains, "and these maps provide all the information necessary to do that."
Although the maps will be a fabulous orientation aid as stand-alone tactile images, additional information is available when used in conjunction with the talking pen.
With such projects under way and more to come, the research at Smith-Kettlewell is clearly mapping out a bright and amazing future for access to visual and graphical information for people who are blind.
