New Low-Vision Reading Resources

New Aids Include Shakespeare Podcasts & Accessible Maps and Browsers

Mar 11, 2009

The Internet continues to level the playing field for blind and low-vision students, offering tools to augment classroom reading and make learning more accessible.

Reading Shakespeare is a right of passage for most high school students. But understanding plays such as Romeo and Juliet can be challenging. Teachers do their best to bring the drama to life while students struggle to process Elizabethan language and sensibilities through the digitized disaffection of their Xbox consciousness.

Many websites, however, offer approaches to bridge the culture gap. One in particular is In Your Ear Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Podcasts Make Reading Romeo and Juliet Easier

In Your Ear, Shakespeare is a website that posts podcasts explaining Shakespeare in a way many students may find more appealing and realistic than reading a play alone or aloud in class. Several podcasts are about Romeo and Juliet, a play often read in 9th grade. The site includes a chronology of plays, a timeline of Shakespeare's life, sections on resources, news, and events, even an interactive page flashing the Bard’s bobbing head to dramatize iambic pentameter, the poetic meter used in many early plays.

The podcasts appear in the Chop Bard section, a series billed as “the cure for boring Shakespeare,” and provide background, commentary, and a modern context on the play’s structure and exposition that many will find entertaining and helpful in reading Shakespeare.

Web Browsers Designed for Blind and Low-Vision Readers

MozBraille transforms Mozilla or Firefox into a standalone accessible Internet browser designed for blind or low-vision users that provides output to large type, speech, or braille without the need third party programs. MozBraille, now in beta, is a part of the VICKIE project whose goal is to create an “electronic school bag” for visually impaired children.

BrailleSurf 4 is an Internet browser for visually impaired users allows a simplified reading of the web information in text form that can then be enlarged for low-vision readers, displayed on a braille terminal, output to a speech synthesizer. BrailleSurf 4 also provides a fast preview of a site’s accessibility level.

BrailleSurf 4 analyzes HTML source code to keep only essential information (graphical objects are filtered and pages are rebuilt textually) to design an optimal layout. BrailleSurf 4 is available in English, French, and Spanish and is compatible with Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000.

New Alaska Map Book from the Princeton Braillests

Maps of Alaska is a 74-page book featuring 21 handmade, metal foil Thermoform maps, the first half of which show land regions, cities and towns, rivers, mountains, national parks, native corporations, boroughs, and climate; the second half is divided into seven regions, each with an introductory page followed by a detailed map, labeled with key letters identified in a braille key on the facing page. The book, published by the Princeton Braillists, is cardboard bound in a multi-ring binder, costs $14, and ships Free Matter within four weeks. Call 215.357.7715 for information.

New Victor Reader Stream Website

Subscribers to the popular Victor Reader Stream email list now have a new website, vrstreamusers.org, which has list information, subscription management tools, list archives, and useful links, including Stream product information, Stream Companion software and documentation, and HumanWare's resource page for finding compatible content.

The web has so drastically changed the speed and efficiency with which blind and low-vision students can locate and process information, the concept of disability, or even disadvantage with respect to reading diminishes month by month.

The copyright of the article New Low-Vision Reading Resources in Blind Students is owned by Andrew Leibs. Permission to republish New Low-Vision Reading Resources in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.