This article discusses findings on schooling, pedagogy and notation in the life-experiences of amateur and professional visually-impaired musicians/music teachers, and the professional experiences of sighted music teachers who work with visually-impaired learners. The study formed part of a broader UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded…

The Unified English Braille (UEB) code has already been adopted by various countries. To inform the decision about UK adoption, a suite of research was carried out with UK braille readers and other stakeholders. Previous research indicates that readers of technical braille codes may be most affected by a move to UEB. In this study, six technical…

Purpose: Demographic transformations within the UK population combine to contribute to a substantial increase in demand for low vision (LV) services, creating a pressing need to reconsider the appropriate methods for service provision. In this study, we evaluate the feasibility of using telephone triage to assess the need for, and timing of, LV…

With the support of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), the life histories of five visually impaired (VI) musicians were collected and analysed between November 2011 and August 2012. This research was conducted as a pilot for a two-year, national investigation of VI musical participation, "Visually-impaired musicians'…

To inform decision-making around the adoption of the Unified English Braille (UEB) code in the United Kingdom, a suite of research was carried out. This study involved a variety of braille stakeholders--student braille readers (in full time education), adult braille readers, braille teachers, and braille transcribers. Participants were sent…

This investigation compared attainment in 196,405 students with and without disabilities who were taking courses by distance learning with the Open University in the United Kingdom in 2009. When the effects of demographic variables were statistically controlled, students with mental health difficulties showed poorer course completion than…

Change blindness refers to the difficulty most people find in detecting a difference between two pictures when these are presented successively, with a brief interruption between. Attention at the site of the change is required for detection. A number of studies have investigated change blindness in adults and children with autism spectrum…

Visual search efficiency improves by presenting (previewing) one set of distractors before the target and remaining distractor items (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997). Previous work has shown that this preview benefit is abolished if the old items change their shape when the new items are added (e.g., D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys,…

Braille-reading mathematicians, scientists, and computer scientists were asked to examine the usability of the Unified English Braille Code (UEB) for technical materials. They had little knowledge of the code prior to the study. The research included two reading tasks, a short tutorial about UEB, and a focus group. The results indicated that the…

Experienced teachers have long asserted that children blind from retinoblastoma (Rb), a rare cancer of the eye, are of above average intelligence. To test this hypothesis, standardized verbal intelligence tests were administered to a sample of 85 children and adults, all diagnosed with the early infancy form of this condition. For 42 of the Rb…

Provides an overview of TESTLAB, a cooperative project of libraries in Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom that addresses improved library access for visually impaired users. A sampling of TESTLAB projects is presented, and a TESTLAB survey on electronic service provision is described. Future efforts and implications are…

This research looked at the population of children learning braille in Britain, where they are being educated, and issues concerned with teaching braille and with training of teachers of braille. A national postal questionnaire survey of local education authority (LEA) visual impairment (VI) advisory services and one specialist school for blind…