One of the greatest warming trends technological advancements present to the world is helping the disabled lead a better and more productive life. Once the disabled have been served, then the average-bodied among us are able to reap the benefits of the advancements in favor of the human condition. First, we had Bluetooth breadcrumbs for the Blind; now we have a rhythmic touch screen with Braille bumps for the Blind.
Rex is a musical savant. He performs in public. He’s been on 60 Minutes twice. He is 13-years-old.
Technology shapes us and betters us, but sometimes it can also belittle our best intentions. The Talking-Points project is a new idea that hopes to use embedded Bluetooth tags placed strategically throughout a city to communicate with the blind to guide and provide geographic landmarks and local business information.
Continue reading → Embedded Bluetooth Breadcrumbs Leading the Blind
“Black” is one of those movies you yearn to see again and again and you can never ever quite get the story out of your head. The movie is a love story of self-discovery and education for a Deaf and Blind woman who does not speak. She lives in an internal darkness. She wants a way out into the light of the world. The box for the special edition of the DVD is pocked with Braille dots you can feel with your fingertips, thus creating a temptation, and an expectation for the drama of learning to come:
Child abuse takes many ghostly forms and has a multiplicity of fathers. I can still remember, decades later, the one time I was enticed by an older man and how the awful hauntings of that dungeon-like experience still threaten me today.
When I was a wee lad — perhaps 8 or 9-years-old — I acted in a lot of community theatre plays and musicals.
Acting was an opportunity to escape an ordinary life for one of imagination and history and it was a tasting of a freedom that has sustained me ever since.
Theatre made me an escapee from the mandatory expectations of a pedestrian community where staying and longing were demanded over exploration and fulfillment.
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