Look Listen Touch

Beginning Spring 2010, we’ll begin work on one part of the following project. Our role will be to build the braille literacy web site, applying much of what we’ve researched and developed over the past few months to the creation of that web site.

From the University of South Carolina web site:

The year 2009 is “the bicentennial anniversary year of the birth of Louis Braille, who, by inventing the means of reading by touch, opened the world of literacy to individuals who are blind,” points out James Kirby, Commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind.

How appropriate, then, that the University of South Carolina Upstate’s Special Education–Visual Impairment Program in the School of Education recently received a grant for $497,675 from the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services at the United States Department of Education. This grant will enable USC Upstate’s Visual Impairment Program, in collaboration with the South Carolina Vision Education Partnership, to significantly increase awareness of Braille and knowledge of how best to teach it.

Read the entire press release…

You think you’re a fast reader?

You might change your mind after you listen to this recording (mp3, 4:12, 2.4MB) of a Civil War-era letter being read aloud by a "screen reading" computer application called JAWS.

The letter is one of the items in the rough draft of our "proof-of-concept" Omeka archive with an accessibility plugin (created by Cory Bohon with input from George H. Williams) designed to make navigation easier for the visually impaired.

We’ve developed a plugin for Omeka that allows a user with visual impairment to use “Access Keys” to navigate through the site by sound and memory, instead of viewing the menus and links visible on the screen. Our goal is to have a finished, working demonstration of this plugin installed on an Omeka archive of nineteenth-century documents by the end of Fall 2009. (We’ve chosen these documents simply because they were already digitized and available to us with metadata.)

In this mp3 recording, the enduser running JAWS is Marty McKenzie of the South Carolina School for the Deaf & Blind and the South Carolina Department of Education.

The other voices are Tina Herzberg, assistant professor of education at USC Upstate, and George H. Williams, assistant professor of English at USC Upstate.

The image, transcription, and metadata associated with the letter (and many other items) were generously shared by the archivists and librarians working with the Littlejohn Collection at Wofford College.