January 28, 2011
1. Blindness doesn't slow this runner
News-Press
January 25, 2011
2. Blind man will use new technology to drive in demonstration at Daytona International Speedway
The Canadian Press
January 28, 2011
3. Nonprofit group helps the blind play hockey
WRAL Sports
January 25, 2011
4. Technology helps bring visually impaired greater access to books
The Express-Times
January 28, 2011
1. Blindness doesn't slow this runner
The son of two migrant workers in Arizona, Gabino Lares as a child was looking at a relatively predictable adulthood. He would work hard, cherish his family and the country that seemed to offer more opportunity than the one his parents had left.
No one could have imagined what happened when he was 14.
School was out for the year. Gabino had left middle school behind, and was looking forward to a summer of baseball, baseball and more baseball. He was a pitcher.
And then during an early summer game, "a line drive up the middle caught the corner of my eye," Lares said. The head injury caused damage to his optic nerve, which sends messages from both eyes to the brain, resulting in what we simplistically call vision.
Although he was hit near his left eye, "my right eye thinks it's hurt too," Lares said. "Overnight, I was blind."
Specifically, his vision is measured at 20/800 in one eye and 20/1,000 in the other. In the United States, legal blindness is defined as 20/200 or worse in both eyes (20/200 vision is the ability to see at 20 feet what a normal eye can see at 200 feet). He more than qualified.
For about six months after the accident, he said, he did almost nothing.
And then he began running. "Out of rage."
"At first, my mom went with me, pointing out obstacles," Lares said. "It was the desert, and everything looked the same. Everything was brown."
Soon his younger brother was following him on his bike, for safety.
Then he began to run alone. "It became my obsession. It was the only way I could be free. I wasn't a blind runner, then, I was just a runner."
Yes, it was a little frightening at times. He has rolled his ankles, missed curbs, stumbled.
But he has learned to use what vision he has to the best of his ability.
In that goal, he has seized opportunities that would not have come along, had that line drive sent the baseball just an inch or two to the right. When school began again that fall, he was a high school student at the Arizona State School for the Blind. He was a boarder, so the quest to regain his independence got a jump start.
He went on to earn a bachelor's degree - the only one in his family to go to college - in special education from the University of Arizona, and followed that with a master's.
Last summer, Lares was ready to leave the desert for the hot-but-less-hot weather in Florida, where he can run more days of the year. Since June, he has been assistant technology supervisor for Visually Impaired Persons of Southwest Florida, a nonprofit rehabilitation and outreach center in North Fort Myers.
Most days after work, a friend drives him part of the way home and he runs the rest, about nine miles to the house in the Cape that he shares with two English bulldogs.
It helps him to run at dusk, when drivers have their headlights on but darkness is not total.
On Sundays, he runs 16 to 18 miles.
He qualified for the Boston Marathon at age 19, and is determined to do so again.
Locally, Lares has run several marathons. Races are more challenging than going solo, he said. There's a crowd, and pushing and shoving. So he usually finds a spot on the edge, near someone who runs at about his pace. It helps if that someone is wearing high-contrast colors.
When he can arrange a ride, he runs with a local running club, the Speedsters.
"He's a very very nice guy," said the 1-year-old group's unofficial leader, Perry Small. "And he runs well. I don't know how he does it. He's got a lot of courage and determination."
http://www.news-press.com/article/20110125/HEALTH/101250309/Blindness-doesn-t-slow-this-runner
2. Blind man will use new technology to drive in demonstration at Daytona International Speedway
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It's a cloudy morning at Daytona International Speedway, but Mark Riccobono can't tell, nor does it really matter to him.
He walks up to the driver's side of a black, Ford Escape Hybrid parked on the start-finish line, opens the door, sits down and adjusts his seat. After a few minutes the car revs up and takes off.
None of that's unusual at one of the meccas of motorsports racing, except for one thing: Riccobono is blind.
Saturday, Riccobono will take part in a public demonstration, driving independently with the help of new nonvisual technology and a specially modified car. The event, spearheaded by the the National Federation of the Blind, is part of the pre-race activities of Saturday's Rolex 24 event at Daytona. Riccobono will drive a portion of the same course as the drivers in the race.
"I pretty much shut out the idea that driving was possible, because I didn't want to focus on that aspect of something I couldn't do," said Riccobono, 34, who has been legally blind since age 5 and was selected from a group of test drivers to be behind the wheel Saturday. "But I think this project is a clear example that when you dream big and put your heart and resources into it, you get to unimagined places."
The NFB, an advocacy group of more than 50,000 members, hatched the idea a decade ago.
In 2004 it began the Blind Driver Challenge through its Jernigan Institute. The challenge encouraged partnerships with universities and manufacturers to create technology that would enable a blind driver to safely operate a vehicle.
Saturday's event has been in the developmental phase for the past three years thanks to the NFB's partnership with Virginia Tech's College of Engineering and TORC Technologies. The students developed the equipment Riccobono will use. TORC integrated those into a working vehicle.
Several Virginia Tech students teamed with TORC and won $500,000 when they placed third in a 2007 competition put on by the U.S. Defence Department to build a fully robotic vehicle. So when Dr. Dennis Hong, director of Tech's Robotics and Mechanics Laboratory (RoMeLa), heard about NFB's challenge, he thought it was a no-brainer to get involved.
"We said, 'Hey, we already have a fully-autonomous vehicle, how difficult would it be to put a person inside?'" Hong said. "We couldn't have been more wrong. They did not want a vehicle to drive a blind person around. They wanted a vehicle that a blind person could make active decisions in and actually drive the vehicle. So we had to start from scratch."
Hong said the biggest challenge was figuring out a way to convey real-time information to a driver who can't see. They came up with a combination of mounted laser and camera sensors around the vehicle, which scan the environment and feed information to sensors worn by the driver.
Working with just $5,000 in initial funding, the first vehicle they built in 2008 converted a dune buggy they bought on eBay for $2,000. That car featured vibrating chairs and vests and was debuted in the summer of 2009 during a program the NFB held for 175 high school-age blind students. The BDC is now funded through grants.
The Ford Escape Hybrid that will be used Saturday is fitted with more elaborate lasers and a camera system designed by TORC that will react with the new DriveGrip and SpeedStrip devices the Virginia Tech students designed.
DriveGrip consists of two gloves that send vibrations over the knuckles to tell the driver how much to turn the wheel. SpeedStrip is a cushion down the back and legs of the driver which tell them how much to accelerate.
"One of the main things I want to do is build technology that helps society," said Paul D'Angio, 23, the lead Virginia Tech grad student on the project. "You can work with the military and make plenty of awesome technology, but it won't help people until years later ...This is something happening now."
Anil Lewis, the NFB's director of strategic communications, trained alongside Riccobono to drive the Escape. He didn't lose his sight until age 25 when he developed an incurable form of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa. Having learned to drive as a sighted person, he said relearning to drive blind wasn't a big difference.
"It's very close to the same kind of learning curve as a sighted person learning to drive," said Lewis, 46. "You learn different techniques, but as you drive you get more comfortable. ... After a while it gets kind of second-nature."
Riccobono, now the director of the Jernigan Institute, was born with aniridia, a congenital disease in which a person is born without an iris in one or both eyes.
With only 10 per cent of normal vision at age 5, he continued to lose vision throughout his childhood. He lost all of the vision in his left eye in the eighth grade. Now 34, he's also lost most of the vision in his right eye, having only light perception of colours and shapes.
Now, Riccobono will be helping break new technological ground. Though, he admits, preparing society for a true blind driver will be a bigger hurdle.
"Hardly anybody in the world believes a blind person will ever drive," he said. "It's going to be a lot of work to convince them that we can actually pilot a vehicle that is much more complex and has much more risk. Now we have to convince society that this demonstration is not just a stunt. It's real. It's dynamic research that's doing great things."
3. Nonprofit group helps the blind play hockey
Raleigh, N.C. — A Canadian man is using the NHL All-Star game in Raleigh this week to help raise awareness for his nonprofit organization, which helps the visually impaired get involved in hockey.
Mark DeMontis founded Courage Canada in 2008, several years after finding out that he suffered from a condition that made him legally blind and unable to play hockey.
“When I was told I was visually impaired, I had to stop playing the game and start playing blind hockey,” DeMontis said.
In blind hockey, a tin can substitutes for a puck. The players use their sense of hearing to track the puck.
A group of students from the Governor Morehead School for the Blind took part in a game of hockey on Tuesday.
“The most important thing for the visually impaired is realizing their own potential, realizing that they have the opportunity to do a lot of things sighted people can,” DeMontis said.
DeMontis said he is looking to work with eight design students from North Carolina State University on developing an improved adaptive puck.
“We’re hoping to do a little more research about the type of puck the blind Canadians use in their hockey, so that we can apply that to our senior design project that we’re working now, trying to develop a better puck,” N.C. State engineering student Richard Norris said.
Their innovation might help expand the sport to other parts of the world.
“The more you get people to be able to participate in any sport, let alone ice hockey, it brings a little bit more joy to your life…a little bit more sense of purpose,” said Pal Strand, youth and amateur hockey coordinator for the Carolina Hurricanes.
http://www.wralsportsfan.com/nhlallstargame/story/9001867/
4. Technology helps bring visually impaired greater access to books
In this age of e-readers and MP3 players, the ordinary book on cassette seems like a relic.
Not to Nancy Scott, though. She scours library sales for the big plastic binders that for decades were the standard format of audiobooks.
"Whenever they have had book sales in the past couple of years, I always go and scarf up all of the cassette fiction and buy it all for lovely cheap amounts of money, and haul it all home." she says. "I have this whole closet full of books to read and it's wonderful. And I love it."
Scott, of Wilson Borough, is a writer and voracious reader who's been blind since birth. She doesn't consider herself tech-savvy, so she recognizes it's harder for her to get reading material. She has a digital reader but prefers tapes.
Although Braille books continue to be produced as well as books on cassette, many audiobooks for the blind have gone digital. The Library of Congress makes between 50 and 70 downloadable books available each week.
Tech advances
Pat Shotzbarger is a librarian with the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Philadelphia.
She says books on cassette have been the most popular format, but digital audiobooks are gaining steam.
The new audiobooks, which use a DAISY format (that stands for Digital Accessible Information System) are proprietary and require a special player that patrons can buy or borrow for free from the library.
The advantage, Shotzbarger says, is that the digital readers can hold up to 80 hours of recordings, with no need to interrupt the listening to flip the tape or switch CDs.
"The ease of use for the patrons is tremendously better. In the last year and a half, we've probably distributed close to 7,800 machines," Shotzbarger says.
Shotzbarger's library, along with its New Jersey counterpart, the Talking Book and Braille Center, is part of the National Library Service, a division of the Library of Congress that provides services for the blind and physically handicapped.
You don't need to be blind to use these libraries. Shotzbarger says most of her patrons aren't blind but have some level of vision loss or sometimes can't perform the physical task of reading a book. Stroke victims, for instance, would qualify for the service.
Services near and far
Libraries in the Lehigh Valley and northwest New Jersey have services the visually impaired can use, whether it's books on CD, music CDs or large-print books.
The Bethlehem Area Public Library has Braille books in its children's department, according to Assistant Director Diane Davis.
Angela Lundgren, with the Warren County Public Library, says the library has a few digital readers for blind patrons to try. If they want to use them on a regular basis, she refers them to the state library in Trenton.
"We're just here if someone is interested in using the services from the Talking Book and Braille Center," she says.
Adam Szczepaniak, director of the Talking Book and Braille Center, says the New Jersey state library also makes newspapers available through about 60 volunteer readers. At the Pennsylvania state library, volunteers help record local history books, as well.
Both state libraries also provide audio versions of magazines, including titles such as National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. For books, the popular titles tend to be what's on The New York Times bestseller list -- and whatever Oprah says.
"We actually had a category where we had Oprah's books when she had her book club, mainly because people would call up and say 'Oprah's got this for her book club and we'd like to have it,'" Szczepaniak says.
'Close to a lifetime dream'
An advantage state libraries have over local institutions is access.
Some libraries, such as Easton Area and the Warren County system, offer home delivery of materials. The National Library Service ships its materials for free, and patrons can return items in the mail for free.
To browse a local library's collection, however, often means getting there.
"The greatest challenge that we face is in transportation," says Mary Ann Alexander, manager of innovative programs at the Center for Vision Loss in Allentown. "It becomes far easier to just call, to make a telephone call to the 800 number at the Philadelphia library and request books."
For those with computer access, the advantage of digitized books is availability on the Web.
Tony Swartz, an officer with the Lehigh Valley Council of the Blind, is an avid reader who says he goes through about 100 books a year. Unlike Scott, he is an avid fan of technology. Each Friday he checks the National Library Service's website for the week's new releases.
"The ability for me to go to a website and be able to download a book -- it's getting close to a lifetime dream that I've had, which is to go to a local library and look at titles and pull books off the shelf at random. It's gotten pretty close to that," he says.
As more local libraries expand their online offerings through services such as NetLibrary, Swartz says that has made it easier to browse locally.
