1. Assistive Technology
for
Sensory Impairments
By:
Arifa V. Ryan-Charles
October16, 2012
2. Did you know?
•Globally, about 285 million ppl were visually
impaired (39 million are blind).
•120 million ppl are visually impaired because of
uncorrected refractive errors.
•90% of VI ppl live in developing countries.
•Around 19 million children are VI (1.4 million will be
blind for life)
•80% of all visual impairment can be avoided or
cured. (WHO: Fact Sheet N 282, June 2012)
3. What are Sensory Impairments?
Sensory impairments refer to the
reduced ability or lack of ability
in using one or more of three
senses: vision, touch, and
hearing. Includes blindness,
deafness, deaf-blindness etc.
www.uw.edu/doit/Video/wt_sensory.html
4. Visual Impairments
Visual impairments are conditions in
which individuals experience
significant loss of vision.
Visual impairments consist of two (2)
main categories:
1. Low vision
2. Blindness
5. Visual Impairments
Low Vision: This is a condition in which an
individual’s vision cannot be fully corrected
by glasses. (http://www.webaim.org)
Blindness: This often refers to a complete
lack of vision. People who are legally blind
may have some useful vision.
6. Hearing Impairments
• Hearing impairments include partial or
complete hearing loss.
• The Hard of hearing have a mild hearing
loss.
• People who are deaf have no useful
hearing ability.
7. Tactile Impairments
• Nerve damage associated with diabetes
may result in peripheral neuropathy.
• This condition is manifested in numbness
or a lack of sensitivity in limbs, including
fingertips.
8. Assistive technology for low
vision
1. Screen Magnifiers/Enlargement
• Screen magnification - software that
focuses on a single portion (1/4, 1/9,
1/16, etc.) of the screen and enlarges it to
fill the screen.
• Software that zoom in a small area of the
computer screen to allow people to see it
more clearly.
13. Assistive Technology for the
Hearing Impaired
• Hearing Aids
• Cochelar Implants
• Captioning
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
The speaker wears a headset microphone that is connected to a
computer, the ASR program “recognizes”his/her voice and
translates the spoken message into text that is displayed on a
monitor. Eg: Dragon Naturally Speaking, Via Voice,
icommunicator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmDVEvJYQV4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=U0bjx01GEAM&NR=1&feature=endscreen
14. Assistive Technology for the
Hearing Impaired
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=424C3Ix1H1o&feature=related
• Visual Alert Signalers
Alarm Clock With Flasher: A light flashes when the alarm
goes off
Shake Awake Travel Alarm Clock: Placed under pillow, this
vibrates and/or sounds to wake you up.
Door Beacon: When someone knocks at the door, the
beacon flashes.
• Infrared Systems
• Conference Mate
VI may be congenital (present at birth) or adventitious (acquired after birth due to accident or illness)
Because these individuals have some usable vision, size is of great importance. Various screen enlargement packages offer a variety of features. The most popular features enlarge the display from two to sixteen times the normal view and invert screen colors for those who are sensitive to the usual display of white text on a black background. Some enlargers also incorporate speech output to reduce the strain associated with reading large blocks of text.
Refreshable Braille displays are devices that echo information from the screen to a panel with Braille cells. Within the cells are pins that move up or down based on the text transmitted.
iCommunicator by Interactive Solutions, which converts speech to text, speech to sign language, speech to computer-generated voice, or text to computer-generated voice.