Research

Researchers listed alphabetically by surname

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Researchers listed by subject index

C

Dr. Joan B. Chase
2598 Gary Circle #504, Dunedin, Florida 34698, United States of America.
Tel: +1 727 733 7771
Fax: +1 727 733 8055
Email: chase.jb@gmail.com

Current & recent projects

Tactile Assessment of Performance (TAP): A Battery of Performance Scale Subtests for Administration by Touch
As Wechsler Verbal Scales are widely used to assess abilities among people who are totally blind, counterparts/analogues to the Performance Scale subtests have long been needed. This battery is designed to meet that need, including tactile block design, coding, problem solving and situational tasks. Statistical analysis and norming remains to be completed; thus far, data has been collected among children and adolescents. Findings suggest meaningful age gradients. Adult subjects will also be assessed.
Ongoing

Last updated: 10/11/2007

Dr. Allen M.Y. Cheong
Minnesota laboratory for low-vision research, 75 East River Road, Elliott Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States of America.
Tel: 612 625 7762
Fax: 612 626 2079
Email: cheon015@umn.edu
Web: http://vision.psych.umn.edu/
Publications

Current & recent projects

Visual span in visually impaired subjects
Reading is one of the activities most adversely affected for people with low vision due to central field loss. For people with central field loss, reading rate is substantially slower than that for people with other causes of low vision. In this study, we investigated the visual span profile for people with low vision (mainly due to macular degeneration) and the linkage between the visual span and other reading parameters.
Ongoing

Relationship of low vision reading performances and visual and non-visual measures
Legge and colleagues (1989, 1993) designed a MNRead acuity chart to measure three reading parameters: reading acuity, critical print size and maximum reading speed. These reading parameters may respond differently to distinct forms of visual impairments, such as deficits in acuity or contrast sensitivity. In this study, two large sets of low-vision reading data, from well-characterized groups with cataract and macular scotomas, were analyzed to investigate the association of reading performances with visual and non-visual measures in low vision population.
Ongoing

Eye movement characteristics while repeatedly walking a simple route in persons with normal and low vision
In performing a goal-directed mobility task, people with full vision sample the environment by making eye and head movements to detect potential obstacles in the path, determine their location and plan a path to navigate around them. Many studies have looked at general eye movement characteristics of people while reading but little is known about the characteristics of eye movements that people make while walking. In this study we examined the eye movements pattern in persons with full vision and with visual field loss.
Ongoing

Gap detection and fixation behavior in persons with advanced retinitis pigmentosa during street crossing
Street crossing is a common daily activity that involves judging traffic conditions, and making crossing decisions about the safe time to cross. At street corners, pedestrians can acquire information from the traffic light signals to manage safe street crossing. However at crosswalks with no traffic controls, they have to judge the speed and distance of oncoming traffic to make a crossing decision of wait or walk? For people with advanced peripheral field loss (e.g. due to advanced retinitis pigmentosa), insufficient scanning and visual search for traffic may result in difficulties estimating vehicle arrival times and ultimately their accuracy of the judgment on crossing. In this study, we investigated the gap detection ability and fixation behavior on subjects with severe field loss during street-crossing judgments and compare their results with those of normally sighted participants.
Ongoing

Last updated: 21/12/2007

Dr. Roger W. Cholewiak
Princeton University, Department of Psychology, The Cutaneous Communication Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1010, United States of America.
Tel: +1 609 258 5277
Fax: +1 609 258 1113
Email: rcholewi@princeton.edu
Web: www.princeton.edu/
Publications

Current & recent projects

Vibrotactile Stimulators and Arrays
Co-worker(s): Amy A. Collins; Carl E. Sherrick
The research of the Cutaneous Communication Laboratory has implications for the development of sensory aids for persons who are deaf or blind, as well as for devices for spatial orientation and mobility used by pilots, astronauts and elderly persons. Our aim is to help those people developing devices for sensory impaired people using the skin as the alternative input medium. We do basic research that illuminates how information can be best transmitted through the skin. Our research questions range from the simple ("How intense must a vibration be for you to feel it?") to the complex ("What mechanisms account for the mistakes that people make when trying to identify letters of the alphabet presented close together in time?"). Our experiments involve presenting patterns to young and older persons through contactors that touch the skin using simple and complex arrays ranging from 1 to 144 active loci, applied to body sites as varied as the fingers, arms, abdomen, back and thighs.
Ongoing

Last updated: 22/11/2007

Lars Ballieu Christensen (Project Co-ordinator)
The RoboBraille Consortium, Synscenter Refsnæs, Danish Centre for Visual Impairment, Children and Youth, Kystvejen 112, DK-4400 Kalundborg, Denmark
Tel: +45 4032 6823
Email: lbc@robobraille.org
web: www1.robobraille.org/

Current & recent projects

RoboBraille
Co-worker(s): Christakis Nicolaides, Savvas Nikolaides, Svend Thougaard, Peter Mølgaard, Ditte Junge, Lina Kouzi, Carol Byrne, Franco Frascolla, Carla Mondolfo, Luca LiberaliJoão, GuerraIan Beverley, Mary Foulstone
The RoboBraille project involved the development of an email-based translation service capable of translating documents to and from contracted Braille and to synthetic speech. Users submit documents (e.g., text files, Word documents, HTML pages) as email attachments. The translated results are returned to the user via email, typically within a matter of minutes. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users.
Project start date: 06/2006
Project end date: 12/2007 - translation service is ongoing

Last updated: 15/11/2007

Dr. Susana Chung, Associate Professor
College of Optometry, University of Houston, 505 J. Davis Armistead Bldg., Houston, TX 77204-2020
Tel: +1 713 743 2308
Fax: +1 713 743 2053
Email: schung@optometry.uh.edu
Web: http://schung.opt.uh.edu/

Current & recent projects

Reading in Peripheral Vision
A major challenge facing low-vision researchers is the growing number of elderly patients who lose their acute foveal vision due to a common eye disease called age-related macular degeneration (AMD) . Patients suffering from AMD usually complain about their loss of ability to perform tasks that involve fine details, such as reading, sewing and wood-working. Because AMD primarily affects the central retina, the peripheral retina usually remains functional. Most AMD patients therefore rely on their peripheral vision in order to "see". Patients with AMD usually read much slower using their residual peripheral vision, compared with their reading performance before the onset of the disease. One major activity in my lab is to understand why people cannot read as well using their peripheral vision. Our ultimate goal is to develop customized text or rehabilitative strategies to improve reading speeds in patients with AMD. To date, we (with my collaborators) have examined the following factors in relation to reading speed in peripheral vision: 1) Print size; 2) Visual span; and 3) Crowding.
Ongoing

Last updated: 21/12/2007

Prof. P. John Clarkson
The University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748247
Fax: +44 (0)1223 332662
Email: pjc10@eng.cam.ac.uk
Web: www.eng.cam.ac.uk/

Current & recent projects

EQUAL CALL: Inclusive Design 2: providing tools to improve quality of life for the wider population
Co-worker(s): Professor A Monk, Professor A Newell, Professor P Gregor, Professor R Coleman, Dr F Huppert, Dr S Keates
New products and services have the potential to improve quality of life. However, many people are excluded from their use because they are designed without due sensitivity to the needs of the wider population. This project aims to improve the quality of life for the wider population by providing the necessary tools, techniques and data to the users of such information, be they designers, service providers or carers, to promote an ethos of 'design for all'. The underlying philosophy is the advent of the designer automatically taking allowance of the needs of the wider population, supported by the provision of sufficient 'just in time' data about the end-users.
Project start date: 01/10/2004
Project end date: 31/03/2008

Last updated: 15/11/2007

Dr. Geoff K. Cook
University of Reading, Research Group for Inclusive Environments, Whiteknights, PO Box 219, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6AW, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 1189 378 6734
Fax: +44 1189 378 6735
Email: g.k.cook@reading.ac.uk
Web: www.extra.rdg.ac.uk/
Publications

Current & recent projects

Inclusive, Accessible, Archaeology (IAA)
Co-worker(s): Roberta Gilchrist, Iain Hewitt, Tim Phillip
This project addresses the dual issues of disability and transferable skills in the teaching of archaeological fieldwork. It will increase awareness of disability issues in Archaeology and improve the integration of disability in fieldwork teaching. The emphasis is on the development of a self-assessment tool kit for physical and psychological abilities in fieldwork. This tool will increase students' awareness of their acquisition of transferable skills and promote careers management skills. It aims to effect a change of emphasis from 'disability' to ability: rather than excluding or categorising individuals, students will be engaged actively in assessing their own skills.
Project start date: 2005
Project end date: 2007

Lighting the Homes of Visually Impaired People - Phase 2
In terms of domestic lighting there are currently no guidelines on the light levels that should be provided in private dwellings. It is therefore not very surprising that at present there are no recommendations for lighting the homes of visually impaired people. The main aim of this project is to determine the lighting requirements of visually impaired people in their own homes.
Project start date: 2005
Project end date: 2006

Part M Housing Collection of Data on New Build Properties
The Research Group for Inclusive Environments in the School of Construction Management and Engineering at the University of Reading has recently been instructed by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) to investigate how new dwellings can be designed and built to provide improved access and more independent living for the whole population including disabled people.We are specifically going to be looking at the following: 1) The effectiveness of the current Part M amendments which were introduced in 1999 regarding visiting a dwelling; 2) How the requirements of Part M could be improved to meet the needs of both visitors and residents; 3) Whether the Part M amendments have enhanced or been detrimental to the functionality of the dwelling for able bodied people; and 4) Incorporating the comments from users into a revised Part M document.
Project start date: 2005
Project end date: 2006

The Examination of the Effects of Differences between Door Faces and Hardware in terms of Light Reflectance Values (LRVs) and gloss levels
An assessment of the ability of people with a visual impairment (PVI) to identify differences between luminance contrast and gloss and to assess the qualitative aspects of viewing surfaces of differing luminance contrast and gloss.
Project start date: 2004
Project end date: 2005

Last updated: 26/11/2007

Dr. Martyn Cooper
Centre for the Study of Educational Technologies (CSET), Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 1908 655729
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Email: m.cooper@open.ac.uk
Web: http://iet.open.ac.uk/
Publications

Current & recent projects

EU4ALL (European Unified Approach for Accessible Lifelong Learning)
The project addresses systemic issues in providing access for disabled learners to Lifelong Learning in the context of Higher Education’s role here and the increased use of technology in its delivery. Where technology is inappropriate and introduced with insufficient support, disabled people face further exclusion from the interlinked worlds of education and work. To address this, the EU4ALL project sets forward the concept of Accessible Lifelong Learning (ALL) uniting 3 key strategies: 1) That the technology that mediates lifelong learning does so accommodating the diversity of ways people interact with technology and the content and services it delivers; 2) That this technology is used to bring specialist support services to disabled learners; and 3) By providing support services and technical infrastructure that enable teaching, technical and administrative staff of educational institutions to offer their teaching and services in a way that is accessible to disabled learners. The aim of EU4ALL is to improve the efficiency and efficacy of implementing these strategies by developing an open service architecture for ALL. To achieve a wide impact the approach taken is not to develop a single EU4ALL system but a standards based framework that facilitates the integration of the approach with a wide range of eLearning systems.
Project start date: 10/2006
Project end date: 10/2010

ALPE (Accessible e-learning platform for Europe)
ALPE will assess market feasibility of the accessible version of an existing learning management system (LMS), called aLF (Active Learning Framework), which integrates with tested components of the flexible and modular architecture called aLFanet, an intelligent learning management system (iLMS) which supports the full life cycle of adaptive e-Learning. ALPE will test the adaptation of the services offered by the platform to the needs of disabled (visually impaired and deaf students) and adult learners, with materials on basic skills. The actual users of the accessible LMS will be visually impaired and deaf students and adult learners, in particular those who suffer from illiteracy problems.
Ongoing

Last updated: 26/11/2007

Dr. William Crandall
The Smith - Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC), 2318 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, California 94115, United States of America.
Tel: +1 415 345 2111 (Direct line)
Fax: +1 415 345 8455
Email: bc@ski.org
Web: www.ski.org/rehab/

Current & recent projects

Talking signs
Project on wayfinding and labeling system for people who have print-reading disabilities. Talking Signs® provides a repeating, directionally selective voice message which originates at the sign and is transmitted by infrared light to a hand-held receiver some distance away. The directional selectivity is a characteristic of the infrared message beam; the intensity and clarity of the message increases as the sign is "pointed at" or approached. This ensures that the people using the Talking Signs® system can choose to get feedback about their relative location to the goal as they move towards it.
Ongoing

Last updated: 31/10/2007

Jenny Craven, Research Associate
CERLIM, Department Information and Communications, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West, off Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6LL, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 161 247 6142
Fax: +44 161 247 6979
Email: j.craven@mmu.ac.uk
Web: www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/
Publications

Current & recent projects

European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO)
The EIAO project will establish the technical basis for a European Internet Accessibility Observatory. The overall aim is that all kinds of web sites should be evaluated for accessibility. A collection of formal measures of accessibility - web accessibility metrics (WAMs) - based on the checkpoints developed by World Wide Web Consortium for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are being developed. Tools for automated data collection and dissemination will be created and continuously improved on throughout the project by feedback from users. The project is being carried out as part of the Web Accessibility Benchmarking cluster together with two other EC funded projects to develop a Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM). Further details about this work is available at: http://www.wabcluster.org/. Further information on the EIAO project can be obtained via the project website at: http://www.eiao.net/.
Project start date: 10/2004
Project end date: 02/2008

Last updated: 31/10/2007

Dr. Michael Crossland
Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, 11-43 Bath Street, London, EC1V 9EL, United Kingdom.
Tel: +44 207 608 6957
Fax: +44 207 608 6983
Email: m.crossland@ucl.ac.uk
Publications

Current & recent projects

Adaptation and reorganisation in macular disease
Reaserch related to the adaptations made by people with central vision loss caused by macular disease, with particular reference to visual behaviour, eccentric viewing techniques and perceptual completion ("filling-in"). This work uses psychophysical, observational and imaging techniques.
Ongoing

Modernising the low vision clinic
Co-worker(s): Gary Rubin
Randomised controlled clinical trial to determine the relative efficacy of two different models of low vision care.
Ongoing

Last updated: 04/01/2008

Dr. Adele Crudden
PO Box 6189, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States of America.
Tel: +1 662 325 2173
Fax: +1 662 325 8989
Email: crudden@ra.msstate.edu
Web: www.blind.msstate.edu/
Publications

Current & recent projects

Overcoming barriers to employment among persons with visual disabilities
The aim of the project is to identify state vocational rehabilitation agencies, public agencies and private sector providers with a demonstrated record of overcoming environmental barriers to improve employment outcomes for individuals who are blind or severely visually impaired. Survey data with selected parties will be used to triangulate case study data. Efforts will be directed toward identification and documentation of emerging trends and promising practices, particularly those strategies using job-site modifications or assistive technology, within each setting.
Project start date: 2001
Project end date: 2004

Last updated: 26/11/2007