Tactile overlays can provide the kinesthetic feedback these students are seeking. Participants in this workshop will learn how to adapt curriculum overlays for use with students who are blind or visually impaired. Several techniques will be stressed to provide students with maximum support. These include the addition of tactile stimuli to an existing overlay using a number of different conceptual approaches. This enables a student who is blind or visually impaired to hear the name of the object as it is being scanned and make a selection based on auditory cueing.
Students get immediate feedback from the computer and can explore and learn at their own pace.
Participants will see how easy it is to adapt overlays with tactile materials. To begin, participants will view a simple IntelliPics activity. As each key on the overlay is pressed, a different action occurs on the screen. To make this activity accessible to someone who is visually impaired, a transparent overlay, that fits over the original overlay, is used. By adding different tactile elements to the transparent overlay, each key now is accessible to a child with a visual impairment.