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Archive for October, 2009

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Nine-year-old Corey Haas can ride his bike alone now, thanks to an experimental gene therapy that has boosted his fading vision
with a single treatment.

The gene therapy helped improve worsening eyesight caused by a rare inherited disease called Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, which makes most patients
blind by age 40.

Twelve treated patients, including Corey, now have better vision, their doctors told a joint meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Pan-American
Association of Ophthalmology in San Francisco on Saturday.

“All 12 patients given gene therapy in one eye showed improvement in retinal function,” Dr Katherine High of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and colleagues wrote in a report to be released at the same time by the Lancet medical journal.

LCA causes the retina to degenerate and the researchers found that the younger the patient treated with the therapy, the better the effects.

“Before, I used to ride my bike just in front of the house and now I just ride around the neighborhood with no one watching,” Corey told a news conference.

While the experiment was meant mostly to show the treatment was safe, it showed remarkably strong effects, High and Dr Jean Bennett of the University of
Pennsylvania found.

“This study reports dramatic results in restoring vision to patients who previously had no options for treatment,” said High. “These findings may expedite
development of gene therapy for more common retinal diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration.”

BATTERED FIELD

They could also help restore the tarnished image of gene therapy, battered by the death of an 18-year-old volunteer in a clinical trial in 1999 and cases
of leukemia in a few young children treated in France.

“The study by Bennett and co-workers will further boost gene therapy trials and provide hope for patients with inherited blindness and other genetic disorders,”
Dr Frans Cremers and Dr Rob Collin of Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands wrote in a commentary.

A faulty gene means patients with LCA start to lose their vision in childhood. There is no treatment.

High, Bennett and colleagues worked with 12 volunteers, aged 8 to 44. They reported on three of the adult patients in April of 2008.

They designed a harmless virus, called an adeno-associated virus, to carry corrective DNA directly into the eyes. The gene they used, called RPE65, is mutated
in up to about 16 percent of LCA patients and the normal gene restored light-sensitive pigments in the retina at the back of the eye.

The treatment did not restore normal eyesight to any of the patients but half are no longer legally blind.

“The clinical benefits have persisted for nearly two years since the first subjects were treated with injections of therapeutic genes into their retinas,”
Bennett said.

Four children aged 8, 9, 10, and 11 can now walk unaided.

Corey’s father, Ethan Haas, from Hadley, New York, said they embraced the experiment.

“You start to think of what could happen — he could go completely blind. And then it’s like, well, he may go blind in the future anyway because it’s degenerative,
so I decided to try it now and see if we could stop it and correct it,” Haas said.

Corey’s mother, Nancy Haas, said it was worth the risk.

“It’s hard to see a child not be able to play like he should with his other friends, and then to have shortly after surgery, he’s out there with his friends,
playing, being able to see things coming from his peripheral vision, noticing other kids,” she said, beginning to cry.

“It’s all worth it.”

Being able to take notes while on the go has been the dream of many a blind person since the invention of the audio cassette recorder. As we all know, audio cassettes were cumbersome, and at times, quite awkward. You see, the main problem with audio cassettes for notetaking is that you have to constantly change the tape, rewind and fast forward through the tape to find bits of information, and if that’s not bad enough, then you run into problems when your machine decides to have your cassette for dinner!

Of course, back in the day, cassettes were all that blind and visually impaired people had to take notes with, other than the Braille Writer. Fastforward to today, and now we have some very exciting options for notetaking. We have laptop machines, desktops, digital voice recorders, and yes; actual notetakers. We’re going to focus on the notetakers because these are very exciting devices that assist blind and visually impaired people to manage information while on the go.

When you hear the word notetaker throughout this post, think PDA. If you’re a sighted individual reading this, then you know all too well what a PDA is, and how they work. With a standard PDA device, you can write documents, browse the web, send e-mail, manage contacts, and with today’s PDAs or smart phones, make telephone calls.

Of course, PDAs for the blind and visually impaired are a bit different, but the same in many ways. For starters, PDAs for the blind and visually impaired are a bit larger than the ones you purchase in an electronics store. The reason being is that these devices come with either a full sized Braille writer keyboard, or a standard querty style keyboard that is used on all computers.

Also, PDAs for the blind and visually impaired come with speech and Braille displays making it that much easier for the blind and visually impaired to access information.

Notetakers come in all sorts of combinations and flavors. They also range in price too. However, what you need to remember is that notetakers for the blind and visually impaired are more expensive than the ones that you purchase in the electronics store. The reason being is that these specialized notetakers utalize special software and hardware to make these devices accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

Many of these notetaking devices come with Braille keyboards, or querty keyboards. These devices allow for blind and visually impaired people to access technologies that their sighted peers do on a daily basis.

Notetakers have come a long way since their inception. The very first notetaking devices had very robotic-sounding speech,and very little memory storage, and most of them used a standard 3 and a half inch floppy disk drive that held information. for the day, those storage drives held a lot of information, a staggering 1.44 MB, which by today’s standards is nothing! However, back then, 1.44 MB was a lot of storage space. Today, we have multi-gigabyte storage devices, and even terabyte storage devices that are portable and will work with most notetaking hardware provided today.

Notetakers have truly revolutionized the way that the blind and visually impaired handle their information. Everything from handling grocery lists, to club memberships can all be handled with today’s notetakers. Even surfing the web is now possible, and if that’s not enough, then what about streaming media?

You can download files with these devices, play audios, write documents, plan vacations, doctor’s appointments and much much more.

Below is a site that will give you some idea as to what these devices are like and what they have to offer.

Check Out Some Notetakers

If you are blind, or visually impaired yourself, or you know somebody who is, then the link above should give you some great information on these devices. However, like I said, these devices are a bit more expensive than their off the shelf counterparts.

My favorite is the Voice Note mPower, which is listed on the web site above. I honestly feel that if you’re going to purchase a notetaker, then the Voice Note mPower should be the one to get. It is actually part of the Braille Note family of products being offered by Humanware, a leader in assistive technology devices and software.

The very first notetaker that I have had the joy of learning was the Type ‘n Speak produced by Blazie Engineering. It has a querty style keyboard, and speech output. However, the speech output was truly undesirable. It was extremely robotic, and barely understandable.

However, the Type ‘n Speak did have some really interesting features that normally come with notetakers. You could create documents with it, manage appointments, do calculations and much more.

However, it lacked Internet connectivity, and it used those 1.44 MB floppy disks in a drive that costs about $300 to purchase. It was truly an interesting learning experience because it was my first exposure to electronic notetakers.

It is good to see that notetakers come in many configurations and styles to fit just about anyone’s needs. If you’re a strict Braille user, then you will want to purchase a notetaker that has a Braille style keyboard, whereas if you love to type on the PC, then you will want one with a standard querty style keyboard instead. You can get notetakers with, or without refreshable Braille displays.

However, with the refreshable Braille displays; you’re going to pay a whole lot more for the notetaker. Just make sure that you choose the notetaker that best suits your individual needs. Make sure that you get everything that you want and need from the device prior to ordering. The last thing that you want to have happen, is to order the wrong product, and regret it later.

Notetakers are great tools for the blind and visually impaired because just like their off the shelf counterparts,; PDAs, the blind and visually impaired can do much of the same things that their sighted peers do on a daily basis.

Is it really necessary to learn Braille?  That is a question that has arisen in many conversations with those who are blind, or visually impaired.  You have your hard core Braille users who will not use anything else, then you have those who switch from technology to Braille, and from Braille to technology in a heartbeat.

Braille, just like reading print is a fundamental part of the entire learning process.  It is a form of communication that when all else fales, you can definitely rely upon it.  You see, the majority of blind and visually impaired people in the United States are all too familiar with the use of technology both in their working environments and schooling environments.

There has been a massive push towards using technology over using traditional Braille.  Now this isn’t to say that you can’t have the best of both worlds.  That is; you can get the feel of real Braille through the use of refreshable Braille display technology.

Imagine for a moment sitting in front of you is not a traditional Braille book, but rather, a tablet sized device that is the exact same dementions as a Braille book, but without all of the bulkyness, and number of volumes that it takes to produce a single copy of a printed book in Braille.

Your tablet device would have a refreshable Braille display that covers the entire surface of the device, not just a line or two like you find in most traditional Braille displays today.  So in essence, you could actually read digitized Braille exactly the same way that you would sit and read a traditional Braille book.  That is; your hands will feel all of the Braille that is on the page, thus giving you the look and feel of a real Braille book, but without all of the bulkyness that normally comes with more traditional Braille books.

Being able to actually, and physically search for information on the page with your fingers is the holy grale of blind readers.  However, technology hasn’t allowed for this to happen with traditional Braille display technologies.

The below summary is an update on a new piece of technology that may make full page Braille displays actually possible.

Full page Braille displays possible with artificial muscles?
{SUMMARY}

Researchers
are reported
to have developed the technology for an active, full page Braille display. Most of the commonly available Braille displays use a single line of 40, 65 or
80 Braille cells (3×2 patterns of dots) that work by mechanically raising a pin through a hole to represent each dot. Blind readers scan the text by swiping
their fingers across the row of cells, sensing the individual patterns as the letters that form words, and then refreshing the row as each line has been
read. These machines are expensive and have little direct relationship with modern computer displays, although they function well for services similar
to instant messaging.

Electromechanical systems for full page Braille displays (40 cells by 25 lines) would be very expensive, as the technology must be extremely robust and
reliable. The new system uses electroactive polymers (EAPs) to create the dots. These polymers deform when a voltage is applied across them, leading some
to refer to them as ‘artificial muscles’. In the Braille application, a sheet made from a dielectric elastomer is printed on both sides with a pattern
of electrodes; when a voltage is applied between a selected pair of electrodes, the EAP sheet deforms, causing a bump to be raised, which is then released
when the voltage is removed. Due to basing production on sheet technology, rather than individual mechanical actuators, the new display has potential to
be much cheaper, as well as being able to represent more graphical information by using the whole page. Systems based on EAPs could also be used to underpin
haptic (tactile) feedback mechanisms for other applications.

End of summary

By using electroactive polymers, it may be possible to actually develop a full sized tablet device that has a few buttons for page navigation.  This new Braille tablet would consist of a 25 line full page display, with a few buttons at the bottom of the unit for navigational purposes.

The buttons would be home, end, skip one page back, skip one page forward, skip 3 pages back, skip three pages forward; just to name a few.

The user would brush his, or her  hands across the entire surface of the page much like they did with a more traditional Braille book.  The device would use SD cards for the file storage, or have the ability to utilize the services of external hard drives and flash drives in which to read from

The device would have some sort of file navigation system so that the users could switch from one file to another stored on the SD card, or USB device.  However, the main feature being that there is a complete full page  Braille display at their fingertips in which they can have full access to at any time.

What this means for the reader is that they can carry with them, entire books stored on removable media, and have normal access to them as if they were traditional printed Braille books, but without all of the bulkyness that normally accompanies traditionally printed Braille books.

A tablet type device could revolutionize Braille reading, and even re kindle the interest in learning Braille all over again, thus, bringing Braille back to the forefront of reading for the blind.  So yes, the blind can have their braille along with their technology too!

A full page refreshable Braille display tablet would definitely be the holy grale for the blind because it would mean that they could read normally, instead of reading in an awkward mannor such as currently being done with traditional current Braille displays.  However, here’s another reason for developing a full page refreshable Braille display, and it has to do with full sentence, paragraph and page structuring in Braille.  As many of you already know, Braille does not look the same way as print does on a page. This would give blind professionals ans students a real advantage over traditional electronic Braille reading because for the very first time, electronics can accurately immulate the printed world in Braille.

However, here’s yet another really great reason to promote such a device, and it has to do with the fact that plain text information written by someone who doesn’t know Braille at all could be read in grade 1, or grade 2 Braille by the individual using the Braille reading tablet device.  The translation from plain text into grade 1, or grade 2 Braille would be instantanious, thus reducing the need for expensive Braille embossers that produce traditional Braille books.

This could be a huge boost for textbook producers because they would not have to rely upon other third party companies and organizations to translate their works into Braille for the blind.  Not only that, but because the device could handle plain, ordinary text means that for the first time, any material, whether it is currently in Braille or not can now be instantly translated into Braille on the tablet device.  Talk about cost savings here!

Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what Braille display technology brings us, so don’t give up on it.