To date, the historical entanglement of disability and happiness has not been considered an object worth of historical inquiry. Nor has the intersection of disability and emotions been used as a lens to examine the history of disability. Our paper aims at filling this academic void by analysing a wide range of philosophical, anthropological,…

The study aimed at exploring barriers to the use of computer assistive technology among students with visual impairment at Akropong School for the Blind. A case study design was adopted and the purposive sampling technique used to select 35 participants for the study. The researchers gathered qualitative data using an in-depth interview guide to…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine students' self-efficacy level prior to participation and after participation in an inquiry-based science camp to determine if self-efficacy levels changed as a result of participation. A validated instrument, the 30 item Morgan-Jinks Student Self-Efficacy Scale (MJSES) (Jinks & Morgan, 1996) was…

This article portrays the complex nature of the transition process for two students with visual impairments (VI), both functionally blind, who successfully completed a bachelor's degree. Standardized open-ended interviews provided individual perspectives on the transition services, supports, and challenges faced by the participants with VI during…

The work described in this report is the first phase of a project to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondary-school algebra-level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. This report describes the initial development, software implementation, and evaluation of the…

Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community (United Nations, 2012). In Europe and around the globe, many efforts have been made in order to include people with visual impairments and blindness into the cultural life. The objects and artifacts exhibited in museums for people with visual impairments are…

Purpose: The role of vision in speech representation was investigated in congenitally blind speakers and sighted speakers by studying the correlates of contrastive focus, a prosodic condition in which phonemic contrasts are enhanced. It has been reported that the lips (visible articulators) are less involved in implementing the rounding feature…

The increasing use of visual diagrams in educational and work environments, and even our daily lives, has created obstacles for individuals who are blind or visually impaired to "independently" access the information they represent. Although physical tactile pictures can be created to convey the visual information, it is typically a slow,…

An increasing amount of information content used in school, work, and everyday living is presented in graphical form. Unfortunately, it is difficult for people who are blind or visually impaired to access this information, especially when many diagrams are needed. One problem is that details, even in relatively simple visual diagrams, can be very…

This study extended the research on a special text messaging system, which allows persons with multiple disabilities to (a) write and send messages to distant partners and (b) have messages from those partners read out to them. The study involved two women with multiple disabilities (including blindness or minimal residual vision). The system…

Because school-aged individuals with visual impairments are less physically active than peers without visual impairments, they are at greater risk for developing health-related conditions. One instrument that provides an objective, cost-effective measure of physical activity by counting the total number of steps taken is the pedometer (Albright…

This article discusses the authors' use of a combination of methods to understand the engagement of special needs children with design features in sensory gardens at two schools in Britain. In addition to observation and behavior mapping, we interviewed landscape architects, teachers, and therapists to anticipate the children's behavior when…

In this project, the authors used the Essential Behavioral Leadership Qualities (EBLQ) method of measuring leadership effectiveness to assess and compare the effectiveness of principals (leaders) of residential schools for children with blindness or low vision in the United States (U.S.) and Nigeria. A total of 248 teachers (subordinates) in 25…

This case study was designed to measure the response of one student with blindness and selective mutism to the intervention of voice-output devices across two years and two different teachers in two instructional settings. Before the introduction of the voice output devices, the student did not choose to communicate using spoken language or…

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas…