A guest on IRoc Space Radio’s “The Space Case Sarah Show,” Adam McCulloch is an educational outreach professional with the organization GLAS, which focuses on astrophysics and accessibility in science. He helps organize the IDATA project, which promotes astronomy for those who cannot see. As McCulloch describes it, the organization has a mission of creating software and tools that the blind and people with low vision can easily use.
Throughout the software development process, blind scientists and blind students have worked on the project, which resulted in software that sonifies images or converts them to sound. In the case of images of space, each light point has a specific tone assigned, and as a bar passes along the image, it plays an assortment of rapid notes at various pitches. While this might seem like a lot to process to those with normal vision, those who are visually impaired often possess heightened auditory senses. The brain picks the tones apart and transforms them into a detailed picture of what the visual image represents.
Another aspect of the IDATA mandate centers on 3D printing, which creates a tactile version of what researchers would normally view, such as objects in space. One unique creation is “galaxy dominoes,” which comprises 52 printed cards, each containing a tactile representation of a galaxy from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The edges of these thick cards contain features and physical components of the galaxy, and the backs contain colors and spectra of frequencies in the galaxy.
Thus, each card conveys information that can be arranged with other cards (as with dominoes) with matching features. This enables students to learn how galaxies are characterized interactively without visual reference.
