Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Exploring the deep reaches of space, otherwise known as humankind's final frontier, is now becoming a more accessible endeavor for those who are blind or live with low vision.
Lindsay Yazzolino, a totally blind nonvisual designer and tactile technology specialist, works with a NASA program called Astro Access that seeks to integrate individuals with disabilities into the U.S. astronaut program. She presented at an event at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind in Salt Lake City on Wednesday afternoon to discuss how those with visual impairments may soon be manning space missions.
Yazzolino's work within the Astro Access program primarily revolves around incorporating tactile information and digital mapping to create aids for those who are visually impaired — instrumental in NASA's efforts to make space a more accessible frontier of exploration for people of all abilities.
"These kinds of events really get our students excited," said Brandon Watts, Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind's outreach director. "When they see people like Lindsay, they see someone who faces similar challenges they do and yet is so close to going to space — it really motivates them to rethink going to that job interview they didn't think they could make it through or take a class that they might've thought was too hard."
During her presentation, Yazzolino shared what her experience as a blind person working with NASA has been like with students who also live with visual impairment, as a way to show them that they are capable of things that many people might not expect.
"At Astro Access, we're really about making space travel accessible to people with different disabilities," Yazzolino explained, adding that she was one of 12 blind researchers who were given the opportunity by NASA to ride in a zero-gravity flight to experiment how weightlessness would affect blind people's ability to maneuver inside the cabin of a space shuttle.
After her presentation, Yazzolino passed around tactile aids that she and her colleagues had made for their zero-gravity flight to the students in the crowd.
The aids took the form of plastic tiles that Yazzolino and her team placed on the walls of the plane's cabin. Each tile included symbols that indicated the location of exits and told the reader the direction of the ground — Yazzolino said that while it was just an initial test, she and her team could read and interpret the signs relatively effectively, sparking reassurance in her heart that it is, in fact, possible to send a blind person into space.
"We believe that events like this are important in order to demonstrate the capability of blind people," said Everette Bacon, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Utah. "We try and raise expectations because we know that low expectations create stereotypes — we want to demonstrate that blind people are living the lives they want every single day."
After Yazzolino's speech, a representative from Humanware, a tech manufacturer that creates devices to help the visually impaired maintain their autonomy, guided the students through a hands-on demonstration of the Monarch Dynamic Tactile Device, a piece of next-generation tactile graphics technology not yet available to the public, that will be utilized to give students who have unique needs more equitable access to educational materials.
"For so many years, electronic Braille existed in a way where you could only get one line of Braille, which made reading a novel or understanding a picture difficult — the Monarch is a device that can display a full page of Braille the size of an iPad," Bacon said.
The Monarch device is essentially a tablet made up of pins that rise and collapse to form Braille cells — it's revolutionary in the fact that it can display 10 times as many cells at a time as previous refreshable Braille readers, which could only display one row of Braille cells at a time.
"For decades we dreamed about how we can make multi-line refreshable Braille," explained Joel Zimba, the Humanware product specialist there to guide the students through a demonstration of the device, which will begin mass production this summer. "In addition, we are also able to display tactile graphics and even display them alongside the Braille."
The device will be able to download apps like a drawing app where you can create tactile images, download games like chess and eventually even use a web browser to display websites in Braille form.
Those involved with the blind and visually impaired community say that technology is making the ability to work in a wide array of career fields a more feasible option for those who are visually impaired. According to Bacon, the national unemployment rate for blind adults in the U.S. has sat at around 70% for the past decade; he hopes that improvements in the technology made available to the visually impaired will help decrease that statistic.
"The takeaway today for our students is to utilize the technology and to keep dreaming because the future is so bright and it's only going to get better," Watts said. "If it seems like there is a limitation right now, soon enough that could become a thing of the past that you don't need to worry about."
