Microsoft’s Seeing AI is an app that lets blind and limited-vision folks convert visual data into audio feedback, and it just got a useful new feature. Users can now use touch to explore the objects and people in photos.
View More Blind users can now explore photos by touch with Microsoft’s Seeing AICategory: Blindness
Sneaky guide dog leads owner to his favourite store whenever they’re out shopping
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Even the most well-trained of our four-legged friends have a mischievous streak in them.
On Friday, Michele Sykora shared a video of her sister Danielle out at the mall with her guide dog Thai.
“My sister’s guide dog always sneakily walks her into this store without her knowing,” Michele wrote on Twitter. “I love dogs, man.”
My sisters guide dog always sneakily walks her into this store without her knowing 😂😍 I love dogs, man pic.twitter.com/UuE9wDN4md
— Michele Sykora (@michelesykora) April 20, 2018
That’s right: Cool Dog Gear. Read more…
More about Dogs, Guide Dogs, Blindness, Culture, and Animals
View More Sneaky guide dog leads owner to his favourite store whenever they’re out shoppingDoctors inject lab-grown genes into boy’s eyes to treat blindness
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On the morning of March 20, eye surgeon Jason Comander injected viruses carrying lab-grown genes into the eyes of a boy whose vision had been gradually disappearing.
If all goes as planned, the 13-year-old patient — who lives with an inherited genetic defect that causes blindness — will experience an improvement in eyesight in about a month.
After a series of tests, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this gene-therapy treatment, called Luxturna, in December 2017.
SEE ALSO: Doctors find virus in a pond, use it to destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria in man’s heart
Three months later, the procedure Comander performed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear served as the first time an FDA-approved gene therapy was used on a person living with an inherited, and incurable, genetic disease. There are no other effective treatments for this specific retinal disease. Read more…
More about Science, Health, Genes, Blindness, and Genetic Mutation
View More Doctors inject lab-grown genes into boy’s eyes to treat blindnessThe BecDot is a toy that helps teach vision-impaired kids to read braille
Learning braille is a skill that, like most, is best learned at an early age by those who need it. But toddlers with vision impairment often have few or no options to do so, leaving them behind their peers academically and socially. Becdot is a t…
View More The BecDot is a toy that helps teach vision-impaired kids to read brailleDisney researchers are working on fireworks you can ‘feel’
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If you’re visually impaired or blind, fireworks can feel a little exclusive to those with full sight.
“Feeling Fireworks” is a new project attempting to make fireworks more inclusive for people with low or limited vision, or who are blind — yep, they’re fireworks you can “feel.”
A new project by Disney Research and ETH Zurich’s Dorothea Reusser, Espen Knoop, Roland Siegwart and Paul Beardsley, it’s a large-scale tactile firework show in which water jets are directed onto a flexible screen.
Users put their hands up against the other side of the screen, a rear-mounted Kinect detects the user, and they will be able to feel “tactile fireworks that are directly analogous to physical fireworks happening in the sky.” Read more…
More about Disney, Fireworks, Blindness, Visually Impaired, and Blind
View More Disney researchers are working on fireworks you can ‘feel’