Who We Serve

About Blindness and Visual Impairment

Globally, there are 43 million people with blindness and another 295 million people with visual impairments (vision conditions that can’t be corrected with lenses). Blindness and Visual Impairment (BVI) can be congenital (i.e., a person is born with the condition) or acquired through injury, disease, or other life events. Though technological and social advances have greatly aided the BVI population, there are always more challenges to overcome.

Different Experiences

The modern world is full of digital media: pictures, videos, games, ebooks, and VR/AR. Very little of this content is accessible to BVI individuals.

Online pictures are supposed to be labeled with hidden text blocks called alt-text, which enables screen readers to provide at least some context as to the image content. However, the quality of alt-text depends heavily on the skill and commitment of the image provider, and most online images are either completely unlabeled or have perfunctory, unhelpful alt-text.
Games are hugely inaccessible, and though that is improving, a BVI individual can't even experience even the simplest of games, like Tic Tac Toe, let alone more complex games, like maze games, crosswords, racing games, simulators, etc. This is, of course, largely due to the nature of video games as a visual activity, but few would disagree that with all our technological advances, it’s long overdue for the BVI community to have better game options than magnetic Monopoly.

Videos should have at least some explanatory text, but ideally should have a separate, dedicated audio-description track that tells the listener what is happening on-screen. Describing a video works well for some media, but is insufficient for technical and educational content, where detail and precision are important. Also, dramatic works like movies are best described by a talented human reader, so as to preserve the work’s sense of drama and storytelling. Unfortunately, most production companies cut corners and use automated robotic voices to describe shows and movies, resulting in distasteful, even laughable experiences for blind audiences.

Technological Deficiencies

One major barrier to using technology to help provide access to BVI individuals is technology itself; as the world grows increasingly online, visual, and virtual, new innovations need to be developed to provide at least some of that content to people who can’t see it.

Imagine only being able to interact with your smartphone by just sounds and vibrations. While audio technology like VoiceOver and TalkBack provides excellent access to most phone and app functions, they can’t convey the details of a graph or moving image. Similarly, while audio tools can read text rapidly and efficiently, they don’t do much to help a person learn to read and write.

Another major challenge for the BVI community is the overall lack of accessibility in our online world. We all browse the web every day. We read the news, shop in various online marketplaces, and use mobile apps. Consider this website. If you were a member of the BVI community, you could interact with it via a screen reader (a software app that reads the screen to you). However, this is not a fully automated process. Websites and applications must be designed to be easy for screen readers to understand, and as content gets more complicated, writing and designing accessible sites becomes a low priority for most companies.

Solving these and other technological barriers can be difficult, but a new generation of assistive tech devices and applications has the potential to help reduce the most severe and longstanding of the many challenges to BVI life, education, and work posed by the modern world.

An Introduction to Braille

Braille—developed by Louis Braille from older forms of writing for the blind—is a written language used by BVI individuals around the world (with different variations of braille for different languages, such as Spanish braille, Japanese braille, and so on). Braille is made up of six-dot characters, called “cells,” that form words, numbers, and even musical notes.

Braille literacy is critical to independent living and career opportunities for the BVI community. It's exactly like print literacy for sighted people.

Only about 10% of BVI Americans are braille-literate.
Worldwide, only 3% of BVI people are braille-literate.

These are shockingly low numbers. Imagine if a primary school had that kind of track record!

Unfortunately, learning braille can be quite difficult. The curriculum is prohibitively expensive for individuals and requires specialized teachers to teach the material. In many cases, students get dedicated training once a week for only an hour or two, because the few qualified teachers must travel long distances to meet students. The online classrooms most people take for granted simply aren’t available for blind students, even though the technology certainly exists to make them so. Studies show that learning a language requires deep immersion to attain fluency. In other words, if you don't continuously spend time with a language, it's extremely unlikely you'll gain fluency.

Braille comes in several forms. Most people start by learning what's called Grade 1 Braille. Think of this like having a single letter for each cell, plus punctuation. Numbers can reuse certain cells from letters, so various indicators (more braille cells) exist to help distinguish between numbers and letters. Other indicators mark letters as capitals.

After Grade 1 is Grade 2—also called contracted Braille. This Braille extends Grade 1 by "contracting" common letter combinations into one or more cells, as well as providing unique patterns for common or well-known words. For example, a five-letter word like "sling" takes up only three cells: ⠎⠇⠬ ("s" + "l" + "ing"). "Braille" is one of many special words that gets its own contraction: ⠃⠗⠇ ("b" + "r" + "l"). Grade 2 braille helps reduce the size of braille books—which can be enormous—but it requires readers to learn many combinations of context-dependent special characters and sequences.

There’s also braille for special purposes: math braille (known as Nemeth code, after its creator, Dr. Abraham Nemeth), UEB math braille (a newer math braille code), music braille, chemistry braille, etc. This means that in order to study these and other subjects, a braille reader must learn a whole new way to interpret the same six-dot (and sometimes, eight-dot) characters, and then keep track of which code they’re using at all times.

If you'd like to learn more, feel free to reach out to us at your convenience, or contact your local branch of the National Federation of the Blind.

Tactile Engineering, Inc
3601 Sagamore Pkwy N, Suite C
Lafayette IN, 47904
(765) 233-6620
[email protected]