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…

Research Question: How can digital humanities projects with scholarly significance be designed with the needs of vision-impaired end users at the forefront of consideration while still keeping the needs of vision-enabled end users in mind?

Details: This project will pursue funding to create an online, digital archive from the 150 years worth of material in the archives at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind. The resulting web site will be built using Omeka for a stand-alone digital archive, but the digitized material will also be offered to the South Carolina Digital Library Project. Making this material available to researchers worldwide will contribute significantly to the study of the history of pedagogy and disability.

However, in addition to the task of digitizing the material (which we don’t anticipate will present significant challenges), we would like to investigate and further develop best practices for accessibility in the design of digital archives of this kind (which we anticipate will).

Visually-impaired end users take advantage of digital technologies for “accessibility” that (with their oral/aural and tactile interfaces) are fascinatingly different than the standard monitor-keyboard-mouse combination, forcing us to rethink our embodied relationship to data.

Furthermore, opening up the field of digital humanities to the issues associated with disability studies makes an even broader range of funding sources available.