Dear Vijay, Your map query was forwarded by me to two discussion groups pertaining to the Armed Forces & the responses are enumerated below. With best wishes Pradeep -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sir, He can take a map that has 3d images and the objects that he wants to refer to are raised and can teach or use an electric selective map that beeps if he is indicating a correct place or not and he can memorise the map like this and teach. hope it works. thanks
ashokmor Band of Brothers Sir, I don't know much on this subject but since I have plenty of sympathy for the blind, and admiration for those of them who brave their way in our wild world, I will offer my thoughts for whatever they are worth. In order to make it easier for the teacher, you should only provide maps that do not have too much information on it. So if names can be printed in Braille, it would be simpler for him. Boundaries should likewise be marked with perforated lines like in 'tear away' pamphlets so that he can trace it by feel. So if it is a history teacher, I don't think he will have much of a problem. A geography teacher however will need to explain much more than just boundaries. It may therefore not possible for your printer to print maps in Braille which will give him 'tell-tales' on relief features, contours, road maps, rail tracks, built up settlements, map signs etc. If someone tries it I suppose the final outcome would be a very highly dotted map that will only end up confusing him. >From what I have seen on Discovery/Natgeo TV I think there may be some software solutions to their problems, but of course they may be too expensive for you to implement. Besides, your teachers would have to be computer savvy. shantanu sukul Band of Brothers " Dear sir thanks for your query. I am an active member of a deaf dumb and blind school committee since over 15 years. in addition I have run a blind children school for few years. I also am in touch with blind people of middle age working in banks and market who are our products. 2. Your query is how a blind govt school teacher can teach maps to sighted students. I would like to advise you that elevated maps are available in the market for all junior classes. elevated maps are also produced and supplied by different agencies on demand. Blind people are gifted in a special manner by the Lord and can grasp some data which even a normal individual cannot .In any case you will have to learn the lesson through the aid of Braille books only. Having got the name of the place, Northing and Eastings right you can ask a sighted student to point it or with practice you can point it. Maps are divided into 1 cm, 10 cm blocks and no map is more than 4 feet by three feet in a class room. Have small Bindi's pasted at the areas to be pointed at the time of preparation of lesson plans with the help of sighted individuals. You automatically get an elevation larger than the Braille dot which will help you. 3. I shall get you more information soon. Blessings Brig (Dr.) Ramanan Indian Ex-servicemen Group Sir, If some software company can give him an Interactive Voice Response system which is connected to LEDs on the map. For e.g. if the teacher says "Delhi" then the LED at Delhi glows and if he says "GT Road" then the led along GT Road glows. LEDs are not very expensive and such voice recognition software are already in existence and not difficult to modify. The cmptr may have to be funded by some NGO. Just a suggestion. May be worked on Regards Shreekumar Menon Indian Ex-servicemen Group Sound Maps Published Friday, May 12, 2006 by CCAer | E-mail this post Canadian Cartographic Association weblog All personal information that you provide here will be governed by the Privacy Policy of Blogger.com. More... Maps are generally a visual phenomena and don't lend themselves easily to non-visual media. There are some maps called sound maps available on the Internet that manage to combine sounds with maps, some more successfully than others. Tony Round has produced a sound map of the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario, Canada using Flash. The "map" is actually a collection of black and white air photos stitched together and is zoomable and pannable. Sounds are tied to a specific location and as the cursor is moved about the map, different sounds come to the foreground, providing the visitor with a sense of what the ambient sounds at a particular location are like. SoundTransit is not so much a sound map as a collection of sounds that can be placed on a map. The user can select a departure and destination city, specifying the number of stopovers they would like, much how one would book a flight. The result is cobbled together, depending on the stopovers chosen, and provided to the user as an mp3 file. The itinerary of the sound transit can also be mapped to a world map. The Berlin Sound Map takes a slightly more artistic approach to its sound choices and is typical of sound maps in that clicking on the map in a specific location provides a new sound. NY Sound Map operates in a similar manner (click on the sound seeker image to view) but uses the format of a Google Maps mash-up. The sounds available here are more intentional than ambient (e.g. carousel at Central Park). The map icons indicating available sounds are, however, difficult to see. The Puget Sounds cape also provides a Google Mash up but it focuses on the underwater sounds of orcas. On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:48 PM, colonel A Sridharan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Listening to Maps There are multimedia maps that include sounds (see earlier posting on Sound Maps). Then there are maps that rely on sound to convey the data, meant for use by the visually impaired. The Human Computer Interaction Lab has a story about how geographic data is listened to. "Earlier digital map exploration combined tactile feedback and sound to convey spatial information. While tactile feedback is potentially useful, it limits interfaces ' accessibility and portability because of dependence on special devices or hard-to-find tactile maps. The standard computer keyboard is widely used by blind users. Its arrow keys are natural means for relative movement in up/down/left/right directions; the numeric keypad supports movement in eight directions.And with remapping, the 3x3 numeric keypad can be a low-resolution 2-D pointing device; users can track grid recursion for three levels, providing resolution of 27x27 grid cells." It is difficult to compare a large set of numbers by simply listening to one after another; it is easier to do so by using music or pitch to represent the numbers. Said one user: "Tones help me do things I used to do with graphs." Definitely worth looking at or listening to are the examples posted on the Lab's website. Instructions and links to various demos are listed near the bottom of the page. Clicking on a link will launch a Java applet. By way of Connotea Col CPC Nath Van Nuys, CA, USA Indian Ex-servicemen Group Join Access India convention: For updates on it visit: http://accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Registration is now open! To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in