Category: Educational

A grandfather has described how a massive stroke “miraculously” cured his failing sight, but cost him his ability to speak French.

Malcolm Darby, 70, of Oakham, Rutland, had worn glasses since measles damaged his sight at the age of two. But after waking from surgery to remove a blood clot following a stroke last year, he said he found he had near-perfect vision. Experts say the side-effects of the stroke are “unusual”.

The stroke left Mr Darby paralysed and unable to speak. But when a nurse walked past he realised he could read the words on a newspaper under her arm, which he would have been unable to do without one of six pairs of glasses beforehand.

He said: “I realised I could watch television without my glasses. Now I only use one pair of reading glasses if I’m trying to read and it’s dark.”

Mr Darby is now able to talk again and walks four miles a day.

He said: “I’m on the mend now so every cloud has a silver lining, especially with getting my sight back.

“But before the stroke I could speak French and now I just can’t get a word of it out.”

Joanne Murphy, research liaison officer at the Stroke Association, said: “The effects of a stroke will depend on what part of the brain has been injured.

“We often hear about stroke survivors who have double vision or lose half of their field of vision.

“But it is unusual to hear of someone whose vision has got better following a stroke.

“However, we do hear about survivors who have developed new skills after their stroke.”

Source for complete article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/leicestershire/8234784.stm

For people who are blind or visually impaired, orientation in unknown environments is a special challenge. A navigation system, however, can help to support orientation skills. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart are drawing information together for blind and visually impaired students that can be accessed with a precise mobile navigation device. (continue reading…)

Raised domes alert blind people they’ve reached end of sidewalk Pedestrian walkways in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area are becoming more accessible for people with visual impairments.

Pedestrian walkways in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area are becoming more accessible for people with visual impairments.

(continue reading…)

“Dai, I want to visit your office,” she said over the phone. “Could you please meet me at Kathmandu Mall?”

Leaving my office at Sundhara, I found her on the steps to the mall. “Let’s go,” I said. She recognized my voice and greeted me humbly, “Oh, you’ve arrived!”

She picked up her stick and slung her white handbag over her shoulder. Holding her left arm, I brought her to my office.

I met Chandra Rekha Shrestha, a visually impaired girl, en route to Shanti Nagar several months ago. She was walking down the road with her white stick, and I saw she was about to walk into a muddy pothole. Had she continued, she might have tripped and fallen, or at least muddied her dress. (continue reading…)

New technology speaks to drivers with cues for driving, making it possible for the visually impaired to get behind the wheel of a car one day, reports Daniel Sieberg.

Elizabeth Troutman is 25 and going blind.

She can’t see the sun rise or the stars at night. She hopes to have children one day, but will never know their smiles or their frowns.

She rides the city bus uptown to work in the mornings, a pretty woman in high heels, with nothing to show she’s almost blind until she steps off the bus and opens a collapsible white cane with a red tip. She tap-taps the pavement, ears alert to approaching cars, feet intuitively following the curve of the sidewalk, then through the glass door and up the elevator to her office. There, a computer reads aloud the words on her screen.

You might expect someone with a progressive disability like hers to be overcome with depression or anger, and some people are. Not Elizabeth. She has faced this future for 20 years, gradually losing eyesight the older she got until all that’s left is a tiny keyhole of sight in her right eye.

Though she became legally blind in high school, she lived in Paris for a semester during college and graduated with honors from Princeton, where some classmates thought at first she drank a lot because of the way she stumbled around campus at night. She now plans to go to law school.

There are, Elizabeth believes, much worse misfortunes than not seeing. In her job as assistant director for development at the Council for Children’s Rights, she meets boys and girls who have been sexually abused, who struggle with autism, whose parents neglect them.

Elizabeth would rather be blind.

Still. If she could see.

Elizabeth – Lizzie to friends – was 5 when her parents found out.

At her annual doctor’s visit, she failed the eye exam. Her parents, Liz and Haynes Lea, weren’t alarmed. Haynes wore glasses and they suspected Elizabeth might need glasses, too. At an Easter egg hunt she ran right past eggs her 2-year-old sister spotted.

They took her to a pediatric ophthalmologist, an appointment that changed their lives so dramatically they remember the date: April 6, 1989.

As parents, we envision endless possibilities for our children, who we hope they become, what they might achieve, the adventures they’ll have along the way. Perhaps unfairly, we project our own expectations on them.

The doctor’s diagnosis was beyond anything Haynes and Liz ever imagined. Or had ever heard about.

Elizabeth, they learned, has a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. It was destroying the retina on the back inside walls of her eyes, where images are captured. She would gradually lose her ability to see.

There was no way to predict how far her eyesight would deteriorate. No way to stop the progression. No cure.

That night, Haynes retreated to the basement of their house so Elizabeth wouldn’t see him cry. He felt weighted down by incredible sadness. And fear. What, he wondered, would become of Elizabeth’s life?

A child’s perseverance

Elizabeth, the oldest of three girls, was too young to understand.

 They told her as much as they felt a 5-year-old could grasp: You’ve got a problem with how you see. And it’s going to get worse. We don’t how bad, but we want you to know we will always be here for you. And we want you to know everything is going to be OK.

Not long after she was diagnosed, Elizabeth was playing in her bedroom, stringing a necklace of beads. It took her much longer than it would have taken another child, as she struggled to thread the tiny string through the tiny holes. Finally, she added the last bead. She was so proud, she held up the necklace for her mother to see. That’s beautiful! Just then all the beads scattered across the floor. Elizabeth had forgotten to knot the end of the string.

Her mother teared up.

Don’t worry, Elizabeth said, I’ll just do it again.

And Elizabeth did.

That perseverance would carry her through the next 15 years, through the ups and downs, through the scrapes and bruises, the sadness and anger, of going blind…..

Source for complete article: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/health/story/898702.html?q=Elizabeth%20Lea

Computer software to spot signs of glaucoma earlier than conventional tests is being developed by UK experts.

The team at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital say the test has the potential to prevent many patients going blind.

Diagnosing glaucoma can be difficult, as patients are often not aware of symptoms until a great deal of useful sight has been permanently destroyed. It is estimated glaucoma affects 67m people worldwide, including 500,000 in the UK – but only half are diagnosed.

Over the internet

The Moorfields Motion Detection Test (MDT) is designed to assess the field of vision.  The software can be downloaded to a laptop computer, and eventually it is hoped to make it available directly from the internet. A central white spot and several white lines are displayed on a grey screen.

The patient is asked to look steadily at the central spot and to press the computer mouse each time one of the lines is seen to move. The lines move at the same speed but move different distances as the test proceeds, meaning experts can detect the degree of visual loss.

Moorfields say the test is affordable, portable, quick – and has the potential to spot glaucoma earlier than conventional tests, and with greater accuracy.

Professor Vis Viswanathan, a consultant surgeon in glaucoma at Moorfields who developed the system, said conventional tests – which concentrate on the ability to see light – fail to pick up a patient’s ability to detect movement.

However, the ability to perceive motion is one of the first things to vanish in people suffering glaucoma.

He said: “A better test would be based on the ability to perceive motion and that is how this test came about.

“In general terms, if somebody is perceiving very small amounts of motion, they are in pretty good shape.”

Steve Winyard, from the RNIB, said current tests often inaccurately diagnosed a problem in people who did not have glaucoma. He said the new test promised to be more accurate…

Source for complete article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7276822.stm
 

A test to study the danger of noiseless hybrid and electric cars to pedestrians was held with the cooperation of some 20 visually impaired participants.

While automakers enjoy brisk sales of the eco-friendly next-generation vehicles, there have been some claims that the engine noise of hybrid and electric cars is barely audible for pedestrians to notice approaching vehicles.

In the field test, a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism study committee conducted experiments to gauge the audibility of such automobiles, and the danger pedestrians could face due to their quietness.

Hybrid cars including the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight and Nissan Altima, and Mitsubishi Motors’ electric car i-MiEV were compared with a conventional gasoline vehicle in terms of the noise they produced at low speeds of 10 kilometers per hour or less, medium speeds of around 25 kilometers per hour, and upon stopping or starting to move.

Various other sounds, including a chime and fake engine noise, were also used to see if they could warn the visually impaired and other committee members of quiet cars approaching.

“We could hardly hear the cars approaching when they ware running at low speeds of less than 10 kilometers per hour. It is imperative that we can recognize vehicles by sound, and that the volume is loud enough,” said Yoshihiko Sasagawa, president of the Japan Federation of the Blind and a member of the study committee.

The committee is hoping to set out countermeasures by the end of the year.

Source for complete article: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20090806p2a00m0na003000c.html

Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that “we see with our brains not our eyes.” Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue’s surface to send light signals to the brain. (continue reading…)

Hard labour, as a lifestyle choice, has more to recommend it than I could have guessed. From those first few hours of holding Sophia, my firstborn, curled on my forearm learning to breastfeed, to the most recent round of pre-breakfast Ride a Cockhorse, bouncing two “fine ladies” on my tired knees, I have been a fan.

But I always knew that parenting would present different challenges for me, compared with more mainstream mothers because I have been blind since 1997.

The practicalities of bringing up children without eyesight are not, for the most part, nearly as hard as you might think. Changing nappies isn’t especially difficult if you’re used to doing everything by touch. There’s no mystery about it. I don’t explore faecal matter with my fingers, neither do I leave my baby half-cleaned. I simply use a combination of touch and smell to determine how cleaning is progressing, and if it gets out of hand and I begin to lose the will to live, well, 10 minutes suffices for a bath and change of clothes: foolproof.

Feeding is also achievable, if slightly more exciting. In the early days of weaning, I would collect a spoonful of food with my right hand while lightly resting my left hand on her right shoulder. In this way I could monitor the position of her head and use my thumb to assess the in (and especially out) flow. I didn’t aim the spoon directly in but used my fingertips to detect her mouth and its degree of openness.

Next would come the lightning transition from obliquely hovering spoonful to precisely administered tasty mouthful without jabbing the gums, touching the soft palate or twanging the lips or tongue.

Running my household is more complex, yet still not impossible. Recently, for instance, while sorting laundry, I flicked the corner of a duvet cover into Sophia’s abandoned water cup, tipping it on to the floor. I reached for the kitchen roll and knocked over a brand new bottle of multi-surface cleaner which, defying its “sealed” status, sloshed its contents liberally over the kitchen’s cork tiles.

Source for complete article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/08/blind-motherhood-disability