Computer and Adaptive Technology

It may have been the worst speech synthesis since, well, the VoTrax (circa 1987), but it sounded beautiful because this room full of blind students had coded their BBC Microbits themselves to produce that "Hello!”

It was all part of our two-day camp with Cyber.org's Project Access on coding/robotics here at the Colorado Center for the Blind. We had ten participants - a mix of middle and high school students and our younger Independence Training Program (ITP) students.

Students from every continent and every epoch imagine, even if only idly, of someday, somehow turning the tables on their teachers. Likely they don’t realize until they have done it, that their teachers also may see such a reversal as an opportunity to return the torment.

That’s partly the story of Role Reversal Day 2022, held on Friday, February 4. Hand it to the leadership of the CCB Student Association for organizing carefully and thoroughly, putting staff into groups and planning the schedule, even reviewing lesson plans from each ”teacher of the day.” This is the group, remember, that collected necessary items for the NICU babies when Avista Adventist Hospital was forced to evacuate during the December, 30 Marshall Fire in Boulder County. They also received an additional $820 in cash donations which were donated to the Marshall Fire relief fund.

For the past three weeks, we’ve been delighted to have Adama Conteh as a special student at the Colorado Center for the Blind. Adama is from Sierra Leone, a country of about 6 million in West Africa. She has been in the U.S. under the sponsorship of Hope International, which has provided Adama with training at their headquarters in Tennessee, and transportation to Colorado to attend the Center for these three weeks.

We want to tell people about the Megan Bening Memorial Fund Technology Giveaway by the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC) because it will put over $10,000 of technology into the hands of blind and low vision students. But we also want to tell you about it because Megan Bening was one of our own.

Megan Bening was a summer student at the Colorado Center for the Blind in 2009.

“She had such a spark,” said Director Julie Deden. “That’s why we were so excited to have her back as a summer staff member.”

Somebody had to do it. So Jamie Principato decided she would take the skills she’d learned and taught herself as a blind Physics student involved with a Colorado Space Grant rocket project and teach them to other blind students.

That’s where the idea of BLAST came from – Blind Learning All Skills Too launched on August 10 with the express purpose of teaching other blind people the skill of soldering small electronic devices, the precursors of instruments like those Principato and other students at Arapahoe Community College (ACC) built earlier to send high into the Earth’s atmosphere.

By Thursday, Jessica was challenging herself to travel independently between classes while wearing sleep shades.

We want to give a farewell wave to Jessica Edmiston, who spent Monday through Thursday here at the Center, not just observing, but working under sleep shades all week, going to classes with student mentors and working on the basics of Braille, Assistive Technology, cooking and travel. And as it happened, she was here to witness three graduations, including partaking of the meals prepared for 60 by the graduates, and the awarding of their Freedom Bells!

It’s no small deal for Jessica to take a week to do this, since she’s the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind Birmingham Regional Center Director. That’s a long title, and it has a lot of responsibility to go with it, but her center contains a recently established Structured Discovery program, which is (the methodology and philosophy we employ here at CCB, called the Alabama Freedom Center for the Blind.

You wouldn’t have needed to be told that Dorine’s Cinnamon-Pudding Cake was an award-winner if you had been anywhere near the Center’s kitchen this afternoon. It’s our spring Seniors in Charge week, and we have five dynamic seniors determined to keep living the lives they want. This afternoon, of course, they were cooking and baking under sleepshades, and the smell of that cake had mouths watering out in the lobby and beyond!

Sleepshades are optional, though encouraged, in the five-day training for seniors. This group is pretty game though, and all are giving them a good workout this week.