by Deborah Zabarenko
PASADENA, Calif., June 4 (Reuters) —For the blind child who once asked, “What is the sky?” educator Benning Wentworth now has an answer: a tactile book called “Touch the Universe,” based on the cosmic images made by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The book features some of the most famous Hubble pictures of planets, galaxies and other cosmic objects, in color, but with plastic overlays that have raised lines, bumps and other touchable textures to allow those with vision problems to feel what they cannot see, Wentworth and others who worked on the book said on Monday. “The detail with which the eye takes in an image cannot be matched at all with the fingertips,” Wentworth said in explaining what the book might be like for the blind. “However, the concept now of what was before just auditorially described to them, now they can take an image and paint an image inside their mind.”
The book is a braille-and-print work, made to be used by both the sighted and the blind. “Touch the Universe” was created by astronomer Noreen Grice, who had already crafted an earlier work for the blind, “Touch the Stars.” That was based mostly on sketches of constellations and other features; the new book is based on actual Hubble images. These include pictures of the Ring Nebula, the Eskimo Nebula and close-up images of Saturn and Jupiter.
Grice was first moved to make accessible astronomy books for the blind 15 years ago when she watched a group of visually impaired students attend a show at the Charles Hayden Planetarium in Boston — and leave bored. “I thought it really wasn’t much of an experience, they didn’t get much out of it. And I thought ... why shouldn’t astronomy be made accessible to people with visual difficulties?” Grice told a news conference at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena.
Kitchen table engravings
Grice started working on the “Universe” book at the urging of Bernhard Beck-Winchatz of DePaul University in Chicago, who suggested using the Hubble images. At first, it was very much a homespun effort: Grice did the original engraving on aluminum sheets on her kitchen table. But she then sent the tactile plates to Wentworth, a science teacher at the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind.
Wentworth’s students evaluated the engravings, often with voluminous comment, and their feedback shaped the final product, expected to be published later this year and to sell for about $40.
When Wentworth’s students read the first prototype of the book, they were “blown away” that anyone had made the effort to communicate this information to them. “Once they got over the awe of someone doing this, then they sat down and said, ‘This I don’t understand, this is confusing,’” Wentworth said.
Each image is accompanied by Braille text and a key so that readers know which texture represents which color or object. For example, a colorful image of Saturn has the explanatory paragraph, “Different shades of blue indicate variations of cloud size and chemical components. Green and yellow indicate haze. The different colors are represented by tactile stripes across the planet. The rings are shown with a bumpy texture.”
The lines and bumps do not replicate every change in color of the visual image and that is by design, Wentworth said, adding that simpler images seem to work better. Wentworth, who has worked on an accessible astronomy course at his school, said those who are blind from birth experience astronomy differently. He recalled a blind child who visited the Colorado school and walked into a dome-shaped tent where workers were setting up a touchable astronomy exhibit. When told that one worker was gluing stars to the sky, Wentworth said the child then asked, “What is the sky?”
“How do you describe that?” Wentworth asked. He said he was still “groping” for an answer to this question.