by Deborah Kendrick
(Reprinted from “The Columbus Dispatch,” August 12, 2001.)
(Editor’s Note: This article was originally printed in “The Columbus Dispatch” and is reprinted with permission. To alert editors of newspapers near you to the weekly “Alive and Well” column on disability rights issues, contact Deborah Kendrick via e-mail at dkkendrick@earthlink.net.)
PITTSBURGH — Imagine having to teach 50 children, ages 3-18, how to get their homework done, get from classroom to classroom, and use computers to keep up in school. Now imagine that all of those children are in 40 different schools and that all have a visual impairment ranging from total blindness to a need for always sitting in the first row and holding print 10 times the conventional size at close range for reading. That’s the job that Terry Pastel, teacher of visually impaired students in Conejo Valley, Calif., and many others like her from throughout the U.S. and other countries is doing every day.
Karen Schoenharl, computer skills instructor for the Clovernook Center for the Blind in Cincinnati, faces a different set of challenges. Teaching mostly one on one, her job is to help people losing vision gain computer skills with screen-reading and magnification software to keep their jobs or going to on-the-job locations to adapt software to work with assistive technology products.
For Nasser Nofel of Palestinian Gaza, diversity of skills is perhaps even broader. As the only teacher for blind students, his job is to translate braille texts from English to Arabic, teach orientation and mobility skills, locate library materials — and, now that he has been to the United States for training — teach students to get answers from the Internet and use e-mail.
The above three and more than 500 educators, rehabilitation specialists, and other professionals from throughout the United States, Canada, and from around the world gathered in Pittsburgh August 2-5 for a ground-breaking training conference that moved a giant step forward in bringing professionals with such broad responsibilities up to speed with assistive technology for blind and visually impaired computer users. Called 2001: A Technology Odyssey, the conference was sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind, the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER), the national professional organization for educators and rehabilitation specialists in blindness, and Mitsubishi Corp. In 26 hands-on computer workshops, participants learned to cruise the Internet with screen-reading software, to make Web sites accessible, and use common applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with speech and keyboard commands. In addition to the hands-on workshops, 36 product demonstrations and 43 paper presentations ran concurrently for an unprecedented collection of assistive technology learning opportunities.
Product demonstrations included a program that converts the compositions of blind composers to braille music scores in minutes, a global positioning system that talks the user through routes throughout the U.S. or Canada, and a talking program with tactile drawings that enables a blind mathematics student to compute complicated equations with 3-dimensional representations.
Conference organizers anticipated a registration of approximately 250 people. When that was surpassed by more than 100 in early May, workshops were added and sessions expanded. Over 500 were registered in all, including program directors and university faculty from as far away as Malaysia, Taiwan, Israel, the United Kingdom, and several European countries.
“I am awestruck by the response this conference has generated,” said Carl R. Augusto, president and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind. “It is amazing that we have attracted people from all over the world, and clear that this needs to become an ongoing event.”
The good news in technology over the past two decades is the remarkable progress it has brought to classrooms, work sites, and homes of computer users who are blind or visually impaired. The challenge has been to find experts able to teach those who need it. The 2001: A Technology Odyssey will likely be referred to in the future as a historical event in merging the information and the people who need it in a hands-on environment that worked.