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“Why Insist on Justice, Why not Settle for Kindness?” Kindness, Justice, and Cognitive Disability
Published in Joel Michael Reynolds, Christine Wieseler, The Disability Bioethics Reader, 2022
It is worth mentioning one other current theory of justice that more directly confronts the difficulties of including people with disabilities. It derives from Aristotle insofar as it aims at the ideal of flourishing. While the Aristotelian view of flourishing is tied to his own conception of what a life of virtue consists in, the way in which Martha Nussbaum takes up this conception is based on what she purports to be a list of capabilities drawn from what is thought to be “a truly human life.” It is the task of the state to fashion constitutional principles, laws, and policies such that people who live within that state can achieve the functions that reflect this list of capabilities. Thus, if a person who is blind is to be able to exercise the capabilities that relate to an education, the state is obliged to ensure that educational opportunities are fully available to blind students, including, for example, texts set in Braille. The theory is very hospitable to the differing requirements of disabled people, but it is less clear how well the list of capabilities apply to people with very significant cognitive disabilities.
Abnormal Behavior
Published in L.S. Vygotsky, V.V. Davydov, Silverman Robert, Educational Psychology, 2020
Bear in mind that the ultimate goal of every effort at settling these types of conditional relations is the acculturation of the blind person to the social environment of other people, and that this acculturation will have been achieved once we have succeeded in causing the aggregate of the blind person’s conditional sensations to converge as closely as possible to generally accepted social systems of intercourse. Thus, although the Braille script is highly efficient and convenient, from the psychological point of view it is not the right approach, since its use isolates the blind person from the general mass of people. A letter written in Braille will be understandable only to someone who is blind and, thus, will not serve as a basis for broad intercourse between the blind person and the sighted population, but only for the narrow and closed world of the blind. Moreover, in absolutely all of our requirements we have to strive towards bringing the blind person’s realm of experience out of the narrow constraints of his disability and to relate his experience to the social experience of mankind in as broad and intimate way as possible.
Robotic Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Rehabilitation Medicine
Published in Lawrence S. Chan, William C. Tang, Engineering-Medicine, 2019
Throughout history, many inventions and innovations in the medical field have been inspired by the need to improve or replace an existing body part that has a deficient or a lost function due to different conditions. Alexander Graham Bell’s mother lost her hearing when he was twelve years old. This tragic event encouraged Bell to become interested in acoustics, and later led to the development of telegraph and telephone (BELL 2018). During the two World Wars, many soldiers lost their limbs. As a consequence, prosthetic technologies have made significant strides, therefore benefited people with traumatic and non-traumatic amputations. Louis Braille became completely blind by age five due to a childhood accident. He worked diligently to develop a code, dots and dashes impressed into thick paper, for the French alphabet for night writing and later musical notations. Eventually in 1837, he invented the first small binary writing and reading system, called Braille, which blind people still use today (LOUIS BRAILLE 2018).
An interactive math braille learning application to assist blind students in Bangladesh
Published in Assistive Technology, 2022
Lutfun Nahar, Riza Sulaiman, Azizah Jaafar
Before describing the problem in this project, it is necessary to clarify few background information regarding mathematics for blind people. Braille is the most accepted method that is invented for the blind students to read and write in their academia (Braille, 1829). Louis Braille invented braille and introduced the idea of raised-dot system to a cell of 3 × 2 binary matrix, as in Figure 1a. This matrix can represent 64 (26 = 64) different characters (Schweikhardt, Bernareggi, Jessel, Encelle, & Gut, 2006; Southern, Clawson, Frey, Abowd, & Romero, 2012). Braille characters represent numbers, symbols, and distinct alphabetical characters. Sixty-four distinct combinations are perfectly adequate to represent literary texts (essentially made up of 26 letters, 10 digits and a small number of punctuation symbols). However, science and mathematics require many symbols, thus only 64 combinations are not enough to represent all the symbols. The conventional braille code for mathematics has some limitations; for example, some of the notations have very complex combination of braille cells. To make the things easier Nemeth code is introduced later, which provides easy combinations of braille dots for all the mathematics and science notations.
Inclusive education: The case for early identification and early intervention in assistive technology
Published in Assistive Technology, 2021
However, other assistive technologies and/or products have specific application to education and education-related tasks, and can impact access, presence, participation and/or the success of children with (and without) disabilities (UNICEF, n.d.b). Assistive products such as the Cboard (Cboard, n.d.) can aid speech development and communication, thus promoting participation in and outside the education environment. Other products, such as UNICEF’s Accessible Digital Textbooks (UNICEF, n.d.a), promote reading and literacy development by providing access to print books in multiple formats that, although designed for children with disabilities, can be used by all children. Assistive technology in the form of applications (smart phones and tablets) can allow children access to information, increase motivation and decrease stigma in children with reading difficulties (Lindeblad et al., 2017). Braille typewritters, speech-to-text technology and talking watches are essential to education access of children with visual impairments (Senjam et al., 2020). Teachers report that sound-field systems and FM systems often used to support children who are deaf or hard of hearing in the classroom are beneficial for all students, improving behavior and attention (Nelson et al., 2013).
Evaluation of Memory and Language Network in Children and Adolescents with Visual Impairment: A Combined Functional Connectivity and Voxel-based Morphometry Study
Published in Neuro-Ophthalmology, 2021
A Ankeeta, Rohit Saxena, S Senthil Kumaran, Sada Nand Dwivedi, Naranamangalam Raghunathan Jagannathan, Vaishna Narang
All participants developed blindness during the critical developmental period and hence plasticity of the visual cortex is different in children and adolescent groups of EB and LBs. Braille reading perception may be altered by the fluent reading of Braille words and tactile sensory processing of the embossed dots. Activation of the visual cortex and its associated areas in all blind participants of the adolescent group may indicate storage and retrieval of semantic information of Braille words. This study also revealed an enhanced fluency of the EB group than the LB adolescents groups, suggesting that training in Braille reading is a critical determinant for increased semantic language processing. Further, a significant correlation between training in Braille reading and interpretation of words for semantic processing associated with the onset of Braille reading and age at onset of blindness was observed.