And the children who did, or didn’t, recognize a model of a school bus. And the sixth grader who identified the shingles on the roof of doll house as stairs. And the third grader who knew a monkey wrench by touch and provided a marvelous verbal description. There’s the ninth grader who identified a cooking strainer as a tennis racket. It is the richness or impoverishment of the resulting awareness and knowledge – and its effect on development – that we are trying to sample with our Background Assessment and relate to tactile graphics skills.įrom our first six kids, all marvelous and each surprising in her/his own way, a consistent observation is the in-consistency of their familiarity with our sample of objects from daily life. The potential content of blind children’s drawings, in contrast, becomes accessible through touch, sound and the descriptions provided by others. For sighted and BLV young people alike, the maturation of motor and perceptual systems proceeds, driven by nature and expectations, setting a limit on graphics skills at any age.īut the difference between kids who see and kids who don’t, of course, is that for sighted children the shapes, arrangements, interactions and identities of the subject matter for drawing are on continuous display, in every direction and at every distance, at every waking moment. And secondly, there are stages of development. These internal factors distinguish kids from each other whether they’re sighted or BLV. Every young person’s ability to draw and to understand drawings is determined in part by her/his individual characteristics – such as talent, drive, attitude, competitiveness with peers, determination to keep up in school, and more. The first is the simple awareness that BLV “artists” (sounds better than “draw-ers”) are the same as their sighted peers in two respects, and very different in a third. It’s quickly becoming clear The potential content of blind children’s drawings, in contrast, becomes accessible through touch, sound and the descriptions provided by others. ) we’ll have conducted two-hour assessment sessions with the first grade to mid-high school. But from my hours with the first subjects, some recognitions and insights have jumped out that may be worth reporting here. In these trials we are sampling the tactile, spatial and linguistic experiences and abilities of BLV youngsters in the hopes of predicting what skill with tactile graphics might reasonably be expected from each of them.īy the end of this week (April 25th six of our participants, ranging in age from 3rd that the primary outcome of this study will be revision of our assessment techniques statistically valid conclusions about the predictors of tactile graphics skill will have to wait. We’re doing home-made evaluations of a dozen BLV children and youth in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts with the cooperation of numerous teachers and parents. We’re trying to get a sense of the major influences on kids’ ability to explore and understand tactile graphics, and their skill in making original raised-line drawings. Mike Coleman from the UVM Engineering Faculty Susan Edelman from Education Gayle Yarnall, access technology consultant and advocate in Massachusetts and I do have a small pilot project underway, funded by the UVM REACH Program. (Partly, that’s because the 24-7 task of building our start-up and developing our products has made it difficult to find the time for research – a painful truth for a life-long academic.) So there I’ve implicitly apologized for any inaccurate observations or naive interpretations presented below. I’m not a perceptual psychologist and I haven’t done controlled studies of the drawing capabilities of people with limited or absent vision. Despite this exposure, I can’t claim to be a scholar of this topic. LLC have probably taken note of the tactile graphics skills and attitudes of close to two hundred BLV people, and half again as many sighted individuals with personal and professional ties to the BLV world. A young girl making tactile graphics on a red intact sketchpadįirst a disclaimer.
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