“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.

Not wishing this to be her fate, I stopped my motorbike and called out, “There´s a pothole in front of you, Bahini. If it’s all right with you, I’ll take you to your place.”

She happily accepted. I took her plastic bag so she could climb on my motorbike, and we drove to her destination. Having just met, we spoke briefly about her profession and studies, and I discovered she was on her way to Tinkune for a teacher´s training program.
Chandra had called me a couple of times since our chance encounter. However, I had been unable to meet her due to my busy schedules.

Finally, reuniting at the Kathmandu Mall, she said, “If you hadn’t given me your business card, I wouldn’t have called you.”

We talked about a range of issues, and I came to discover that Chandra possessed a deep and diverse knowledge which would challenge that of many physically fit people.

The visually-impaired are at unavoidable disadvantages when it comes to learning. It is due to the lack of reading materials published in Braille. Unfortunately for Chandra, her love of study has always been hampered by the inaccessibility of study materials. Computer-based listening materials are available for the visually impaired, but this is a luxury for her.

Having come from Dhulikhel, one of Kathmandu’s neighboring towns, Chandra passed her School Leaving Certificate examinations in 1992. Since then, she has completed further studies, including a computer course and self-living training, in India. Sadly, due to lack of time and resources, Chandra was unable to continue her education to Master´s level.

Although she has a mother and three brothers and sisters-in-law in her family, Chandra has been living on her own for the past year. She cooks for herself and washes her own clothes while managing to teach every morning at Anam Nagar’s Rudramati Primary School. As a health and physical teacher, she teaches the schoolchildren exercises which they enjoy a great deal.

Kathmandu is not a friendly city for the visually-impaired or other physically-challenged persons. Thousands of motorbikes and cars compete on the road, yet very few stop to assist those with disabilities reach their destinations. I can only imagine how difficult these people’s lives must be when even able-bodied people find themselves lost in this merciless city.

So how does Chandra cope? Through imagination and memory. While doing her household chores, she tries to remember people, places, and things, and their orientation to her world in order to manage her daily life. She is a courageous and confident person, telling me that she made the decision to live alone after her brothers said they would take turns looking after her each month. Chandra felt this would hurt her self-esteem and would prefer to be independent.

Chandra’s main source of information is through her FM radio, learning about various issues as they are broadcast. Inspired by the power of radio, she took training to be a radio anchor, and thus hopes to be a radio program presenter one day. She would also like to own listening books to increase her knowledge, even though these are rarely available in Kathmandu.

Chandra lost her eyesight as a baby and had to learn how to survive at an early age. Although her entire world is shrouded in darkness, she keeps the light in her home switched on for the sake of others. “I think I shouldn’t keep my home in darkness, so I switch on the light.”

We talked for a long time about her life and aspirations. When she mentioned her desire for further studies, I suggested a college near her home.

Although Chandra is a great lover of dramas and her home is near the Gurukul Theater, she has never had the chance to visit there. She asked if I would take her to the theater one day, and I have promised to do so.

After visiting my office, we went to a restaurant. She loved the momos and coffee, eating each momo gently with a fork and sipping her coffee, explaining, “Noble people drink coffee this way.” I smiled at her sense of humor.

I described the scene around us as we set off on my motorbike to her home. This made her happy, remembering the Bollywood movie “Anuraag”. I have not yet had the chance to see this film, but I will watch it one day.

The next time I saw Chandra, I was accompanied by my photojournalist colleague Chandra Shekhar Karki. I wanted to interview this inspirational woman. She was happy, but said, “I don´t want our relationship to be one of a journalist and a subject to write about, but a sentimental relationship.”

Thank you, Chandra Rekha. You have reminded me of what truly matter in life but are mostly lacking in our city. Sometimes we journalists also forget the sentiments of the very people we write about.

Source for complete article: http://theweek.myrepublica.com/details.php?news_id=8903

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

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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.

Legal blindness is defined by U.S. law as vision that is 20/200 or worse, or has a field of view that is less than 20 degrees in diameter. The condition afflicts more than one million Americans over the age of 40, according to the National Institutes of Health. Adult vision loss costs the country about $51.4 billion per year.

About two million optic nerves are required to transmit visual signals from the retina—the portion of the eye where light information is decoded or translated into nerve pulses—to the brain’s primary visual cortex. With BrainPort, the device being developed by neuroscientists at Middleton, Wisc.–based Wicab, Inc. (a company co-founded by the late Back-y-Rita), visual data are collected through a small digital video camera about 1.5 centimeters in diameter that sits in the center of a pair of sunglasses worn by the user. Bypassing the eyes, the data are transmitted to a handheld base unit, which is a little larger than a cell phone. This unit houses such features as zoom control, light settings and shock intensity levels as well as a central processing unit (CPU), which converts the digital signal into electrical pulses—replacing the function of the retina.

From the CPU, the signals are sent to the tongue via a “lollipop,” an electrode array about nine square centimeters that sits directly on the tongue. Each electrode corresponds to a set of pixels. White pixels yield a strong electrical pulse, whereas black pixels translate into no signal. Densely packed nerves at the tongue surface receive the incoming electrical signals, which feel a little like Pop Rocks or champagne bubbles to the user…

Source for complete article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=device-lets-blind-see-with-tongues

John Parker was officiating at a Topeka soccer league game in 1981 when his life changed forever.

He graduated from Hayden in 1979 and played amateur soccer with the intention of trying out as a goalie for a pro soccer team because he was too short to play basketball, his favorite sport, in elite leagues.

But life sometimes has a way of altering plans.

Parker was lining players up for a direct kick when the person taking the kick went before Parker’s whistle and hit him squarely in the head with the ball from 10 feet away.

“To be told by the doctor you won’t be able to see clearly again, you won’t be able to drive, you won’t be able to read, to see people’s faces from outside of six inches — it’s just devastating,” Parker said.

The hit to Parker’s head jarred his optic nerves and inflamed them, which led to their deterioration. Parker has severe bilateral optic neuritis, and he can’t see anything centrally but has some peripheral vision and sees contrast.

“I felt very alone,” Parker said. “I didn’t cope very well at first.”

With support from his brother Phil; an “ornery” friend Dennis Baranski; who still wanted to bet when they played golf; and others, Parker made a spectacular rebound. Since the injury, he has played 20 years of beep baseball, which is for the visually impaired; created the beep baseball team the Kansas All Stars; and was elected the first president of the Kansas Association of Blind Athletes.

“If you help empower somebody they will empower themselves,” Parker said of one of KABA’s aims, “and they spread it around.”

Parker began empowering himself after coping with his condition. One way he did this was through beep baseball. He started playing in 1990 and excelled, despite numerous trips to the emergency room.

“This is a very intense sport,” Parker said, as he rattled off a list of injuries he has suffered — broken ribs, a broken knee, arm, nose and cheekbone and a couple of concussions. His right eye doesn’t close when he sleeps because of the injury to his cheek bone….

Source for complete article: http://cjonline.com/news/local/2009-08-16/beep_baseball_keeps_man_active

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