Sensory Substitution, Key to Inclusive Learning

Visually impaired students, in primary education, encounter unique challenges while learning creative skills, exploring artistic expression and developing problem-solving skills, because so much instructional content is delivered visually. Sensory substitution—an approach that replaces visual information with feedback from other intact senses like touch, sound, taste or smell—provides an opportunity to address those challenges. Through the use of sensory substitution, this thesis proposes concrete ways to capitalize on the enhanced abilities of visually impaired primary school students. The research outcome of this thesis is a system of templates that puts these enhanced abilities to work for visually impaired students, to support them while they learn creative skills and practice problem-solving in a classroom setting. Each template contains a lesson that can be learned by using the process of paper quilling. The templates work equally well for sighted and visually impaired students, since all will be able to understand the lesson by using the sense of touch, as they learn by making

Spatial representation and visual impairement - Developmental trends and new technological tools for assessment and rehabilitation

It is well known that perception is mediated by the five sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste), which allows us to explore the world and build a coherent spatio-temporal representation of the surrounding environment. Typically, our brain collects and integrates coherent information from all the senses to build a reliable spatial representation of the world. In this sense, perception emerges from the individual activity of distinct sensory modalities, operating as separate modules, but rather from multisensory integration processes. The interaction occurs whenever inputs from the senses are coherent in time and space (Eimer, 2004). Therefore, spatial perception emerges from the contribution of unisensory and multisensory information, with a predominant role of visual information for space processing during the first years of life. Despite a growing body of research indicates that visual experience is essential to develop spatial abilities, to date very little is known about the mechanisms underpinning spatial development when the visual input is impoverished (low vision) or missing (blindness). The thesis's main aim is to increase knowledge about the impact of visual deprivation on spatial development and consolidation and to evaluate the effects of novel technological systems to quantitatively improve perceptual and cognitive spatial abilities in case of visual impairments. Chapter 1 summarizes the main research findings related to the role of vision and multisensory experience on spatial development. Overall, such findings indicate that visual experience facilitates the acquisition of allocentric spatial capabilities, namely perceiving space according to a perspective different from our body. Therefore, it might be stated that the sense of sight allows a more comprehensive representation of spatial information since it is based on environmental landmarks that are independent of body perspective. Chapter 2 presents original studies carried out by me as a Ph.D. student to investigate the developmental mechanisms underpinning spatial development and compare the spatial performance of individuals with affected and typical visual experience, respectively visually impaired and sighted. Overall, these studies suggest that vision facilitates the spatial representation of the environment by conveying the most reliable spatial reference, i.e., allocentric coordinates. However, when visual feedback is permanently or temporarily absent, as in the case of congenital blindness or blindfolded individuals, respectively, compensatory mechanisms might support the refinement of haptic and auditory spatial coding abilities. The studies presented in this chapter will validate novel experimental paradigms to assess the role of haptic and auditory experience on spatial representation based on external (i.e., allocentric) frames of reference. Chapter 3 describes the validation process of new technological systems based on unisensory and multisensory stimulation, designed to rehabilitate spatial capabilities in case of visual impairment. Overall, the technological validation of new devices will provide the opportunity to develop an interactive platform to rehabilitate spatial impairments following visual deprivation. Finally, Chapter 4 summarizes the findings reported in the previous Chapters, focusing the attention on the consequences of visual impairment on the developmental of unisensory and multisensory spatial experience in visually impaired children and adults compared to sighted peers. It also wants to highlight the potential role of novel experimental tools to validate the use to assess spatial competencies in response to unisensory and multisensory events and train residual sensory modalities under a multisensory rehabilitation

In the dark – designing navigation for a haptic theatre experience

We describe the ongoing work of a collaborative theatre project, in which blind and sighted members of an interdisciplinary team are working on the creation of an immersive and accessible theatre experience. The theatre experience is set in pitch dark, and uses audio and haptic ubiquitous technologies to guide both blind and sighted members of the audience. During two sessions which explored the use of enactive navigation in the dark space, participants were able to locate areas of interest within the dark, using enactive explorative navigation, and some participants described this as a ‘dense’ experience

Septo-Optic Dysplasia: Educational Issues

Ninety-nine articles published in professional journals related to septo-optic dysplasia (SOD) or the education of young blind children were reviewed by a special education teacher and parent of a blind one year old boy diagnosed with SOD. The articles were classified by publication type (e.g., research studies, descriptive articles, guides, position papers, reviews of literature). Fifty-three of the 99 articles were research studies; these 53 research studies were classified by research design (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods); the participants and data sources of each study were identified; and the findings of each study were summarized. All 99 articles were then analyzed using a modified version of the Stevick-Callaizi-Keen method to draw out the essential themes of this body of literature. The 11 themes that emerged from this analysis included: (a) septo-optic dysplasia and optic nerve hypoplasia; (b) parenting and early intervention; (c) cognitive development; (d) language development; (e) orientation and mobility; (f) social behavior; (g) assistive technology; (h) educational placement; (i) emergent literacy; (j) Braille literacy; and (k) assessment. These themes were then considered from the author's roles of parent and teacher

Interactive audio-tactile maps for visually impaired people

International audienceVisually impaired people face important challenges related to orientation and mobility. Indeed, 56% of visually impaired people in France declared having problems concerning autonomous mobility. These problems often mean that visually impaired people travel less, which influences their personal and professional life and can lead to exclusion from society. Therefore this issue presents a social challenge as well as an important research area. Accessible geographic maps are helpful for acquiring knowledge about a city's or neighborhood's configuration, as well as selecting a route to reach a destination. Traditionally, raised-line paper maps with braille text have been used. These maps have proved to be efficient for the acquisition of spatial knowledge by visually impaired people. Yet, these maps possess significant limitations. For instance, due to the specificities of the tactile sense only a limited amount of information can be displayed on a single map, which dramatically increases the number of maps that are needed. For the same reason, it is difficult to represent specific information such as distances. Finally, braille labels are used for textual descriptions but only a small percentage of the visually impaired population reads braille. In France 15% of blind people are braille readers and only 10% can read and write. In the United States, fewer than 10% of the legally blind people are braille readers and only 10% of blind children actually learn braille. Recent technological advances have enabled the design of interactive maps with the aim to overcome these limitations. Indeed, interactive maps have the potential to provide a broad spectrum of the population with spatial knowledge, irrespective of age, impairment, skill level, or other factors. To this regard, they might be an efficient means for providing visually impaired people with access to geospatial information. In this paper we give an overview of our research on making geographic maps accessible to visually impaired people

The Role of Vision on Spatial Competence

Several pieces of evidence indicate that visual experience during development is fundamental to acquire long-term spatial capabilities. For instance, reaching abilities tend to emerge at 5 months of age in sighted infants, while only later at 10 months of age in blind infants. Moreover, other spatial skills such as auditory localization and haptic orientation discrimination tend to be delayed or impaired in visually impaired children, with a huge impact on the development of sighted-like perceptual and cognitive asset. Here, we report an overview of studies showing that the lack of vision can interfere with the development of coherent multisensory spatial representations and highlight the contribution of current research in designing new tools to support the acquisition of spatial capabilities during childhood

Mental Rotation of Digitally-Rendered Haptic Objects by the Visually-Impaired.

In the event of visual impairment or blindness, information from other intact senses can be used as substitutes to retrain (and in extremis replace) visual functions. Abilities including reading, mental representation of objects and spatial navigation can be performed using tactile information. Current technologies can convey a restricted library of stimuli, either because they depend on real objects or renderings with low resolution layouts. Digital haptic technologies can overcome such limitations. The applicability of this technology was previously demonstrated in sighted participants. Here, we reasoned that visually-impaired and blind participants can create mental representations of letters presented haptically in normal and mirror-reversed form without the use of any visual information, and mentally manipulate such representations. Visually-impaired and blind volunteers were blindfolded and trained on the haptic tablet with two letters (either L and P or F and G). During testing, they haptically explored on any trial one of the four letters presented at 0°, 90°, 180°, or 270° rotation from upright and indicated if the letter was either in a normal or mirror-reversed form. Rotation angle impacted performance; greater deviation from 0° resulted in greater impairment for trained and untrained normal letters, consistent with mental rotation of these haptically-rendered objects. Performance was also generally less accurate with mirror-reversed stimuli, which was not affected by rotation angle. Our findings demonstrate, for the first time, the suitability of a digital haptic technology in the blind and visually-impaired. Classic devices remain limited in their accessibility and in the flexibility of their applications. We show that mental representations can be generated and manipulated using digital haptic technology. This technology may thus offer an innovative solution to the mitigation of impairments in the visually-impaired, and to the training of skills dependent on mental representations and their spatial manipulation