The New York times


July 3, 2002

Technology Eases the Way for the Visually Impaired By JENNIFER MEDINA

Gerard Guarniero spent eighth grade using a Braille slate - an eight-inch
metal device that looks like a ruler with four rows of stencil spaces for
lettering. He would place paper between the two sides and use a short
pointer to punch holes in the paper. It would take him three or four
times as long to write the same paper as his sighted classmates.

Some 30 years later, when Pratik Patel was in eighth grade at
Intermediate School 237, a mainstream school in Queens, he could simply
type his essays on a keyboard. He sent his work to a Braille printer,
where a sheet with raised lettering would come out in minutes.

Mr. Guarniero, 52, and Mr. Patel, 22, were among dozens of students who
gathered at a recent retirement party in Queens honoring their middle
school teacher, Betty Salz, whose work with blind students in New York
City spans more than four decades. There, they traded fond memories of
Mrs. Salz's classes and marveled about the way computers are changing the
lives of the sightless and visually impaired.

Just as computers and other personal technology gadgets have
revolutionized learning for sighted students, personal data assistants,
word processing and the Internet have rapidly altered the ways blind
students do schoolwork.

Mrs. Salz, who retired after teaching blind students for 33 years,
remembers staying up for hours translating assignments she used for other
classes into Braille and then taking the students' Braille-written papers
and typing them. The tedious process would take hours, even though Mrs.
Salz was an expert Braillist.

"It's a different world now. I just scan the books, translate them and
print them out in a few hours," said Mrs. Salz, who is not blind.

But the rapidly developing methods, called assistive technology, have not
come without some groans from teachers.

Just a few years ago, the new equipment was gathering dust in a room,
said Rose Chin, the technology trainer for educational vision services in
District 75, which oversees programs for about 1,100 blind and visually
impaired students.

"Nobody knew what to do with anything," Ms. Chin said. "They were
mystified by it. They were still in a fog."

Several of the teachers Ms. Chin worked with refused to go anywhere near
the computers in the early 1990's, preferring to stick to typewriters and
Braille typing. All their reluctance gave her time to understand what the
machines were capable of.

Now, the same teachers cannot imagine going back to technology as it once
was.

Barriers have been nearly eliminated in subjects that rely on essays and
stories, like history and English. In biology, geometry and other classes
that use graphics, learning can be far more complicated. Students in math
and science classes use raised line drawings to read the graphics and
special paper and pens to create the diagrams themselves.

Perhaps the most important improvement has come in the most basic, and
often most dreaded, part of school - the taking of notes.

Braille is based on a six-point system, where every letter, number and
punctuation mark is assigned a combination of each of the six points.
Until the last decade, students would use a stylus to punch holes into
the Braille slate, making it impossible for them to keep up with students
who used pen and paper.

Robert Feinstein, 52, would often hear other students complain about the
tap-tap-tap sounds that he made as he punched holes into his thick paper.
Mr. Feinstein says it sounded much like a woodpecker.

Now, the sounds of Mr. Patel taking notes at Queens College are no louder
than those of a computer keyboard. Most blind students now use a machine
called Braille Lite, a personal data assistant that works like a Palm
Pilot, with a memo pad for notes, appointment calendar and address book.
The six keys on the machine allow students to type in Braille and a
display shows each line in Braille.

In the 1970's, none of Mrs. Salz's students could have imagined such a
machine; now, nearly all her blind students own one.

None of these advancements can be overemphasized, said Jay D. Leventhal,
a technology associate with the American Foundation of the Blind and the
editor of AccessWorld magazine, which critiques new machines. Mr.
Leventhal uses his Braille Lite to store up to three books, which he can
then read anywhere he takes the five-pound machine.

"Technology is one of the driving forces behind advancement of
independence for the blind," he said. "Even teachers may not realize what
the technology can do, so they are not utilized properly yet."

Ms. Chin bristled when another teacher who was attending Mrs. Salz's
party said that she was unable to use the Braille printer for Spanish
assignments.

"You probably just weren't doing it right. You just have to set it"
properly, Ms. Chin explained. "I'll come and show you."

That's precisely the approach Mr. Patel wants to see. Just eight years
after Mrs. Salz's eighth-grade instruction, Mr. Patel now runs a
technology program for the blind at the City University of New York.

Though he is pleased with the advancements, problems remain with new
developments like Internet-based distance learning.

"There are still so many things that are changing the ways we learn," Mr.
Patel said. "It might be an entirely different world in just a few
years."