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Below the video are some Scholarships links to apply for the budding young Astronaut in your family, these scholarships can cover full tuition and partial or full travel expenses to the Space Camp for Interested Vision Impaired Students (SCIVIS)!

Space Camp for Interested Vision Impaired Students (SCIVIS) part 1

Since 1990, over 3500 students from the U. S. and many foreign countries have attended SCIVIS. For many of those students it has been the highlight of their middle and high school years. Comments like, “this is the best week of my school year” and “at SCIVIS I don’t have to explain my visual impairment to people because everyone there gets it”, are heard all the time.

2016 Lighthouse Scholarship Application now available!! Deadline: April 1, 2016

2016 Northrop Grumman Scholarship Application now available!! Deadline: April 1, 2016

2016 Delta Gamma SCIVIS Scholarship Form MS Word document (40k) Deadline May 2, 2016

Space Camp for Interested Vision Impaired Students (SCIVIS) is

A week long camp that takes place at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama
Coordinated by teachers of the visually impaired
Accessible; computers used by students in the Space Camp Programs have been adapted for speech and large print output; materials and equipment used during missions are available in braille and large print
Participatory – students participate fully (each student is screened based on their eye medical condition –limitations may be placed on some)

SCIVIS is actually 4 separate programs.

Space Camp
Space Academy
Advanced Academy focus on space travel.
Aviation Challenge.

More information is available Here: http://www.tsbvi.edu/space/

Space Camp for Interested Visually Impaired Students (SCIVIS) – Part 2 Aviation Challenge

More information is available Here: http://www.tsbvi.edu/space/

original article By Kelsey D. Atherton on http://www.popsci.com

One of the weaknesses of screen-based media is how inaccessible it can be for people with impaired vision, who must instead rely on screen readers and other specialized tools to speak aloud the words in an online article. A special touchscreen tablet, made by a team at the University of Michigan, aims to bring braille into the future, by creating a readably tactile surface.

Check Out the YouTube video below:

Developed in the 19th century in France by the code’s eponymous Louis Braille, the system was inspired by a military system that used raised dots to create a text soldiers could read with their fingers in the dark of night without using any light that could give away their position to the enemy. Braille’s codified system created words, letters, and characters out of a six-dot grid: two parallel rows each with three raised dots form a single Braille “cell.” Like any system of writing, it’s adapted to usage and time and often includes contractions and other shortcuts.

In print and writing, braille is raised dots on paper, placed their by a machine or by a person using a slate and stylus. Translating that to machines has meant, for the most part, creating special braille readers that use a pin in place of each dot, which is raised or depressed to match the word it’s displaying. Think of pixels on a monochrome computer monitor, only a lot more cumbersome to create. There are braille devices that can turn text on a screen into readable braille, but they’re expensive and usually only show a single line of text at a time. That’s great for a 4-digit tool like this South Korean watch that displays in braille, but not so great if someone wants to read a book or even just an article.

It also limits the kinds of information that people can read. Graphs, spreadsheets, charts of all kinds, or anything on a page showing a spatial relationship simply can’t be done in a single line reader. So University of Michigan Professor Sile O’Modhrain, together with associate professor Brent Gillespie and doctoral candidate Alexander Russomanno, are working on a pneumatic system that they hope will show a full page of braille. Instead of a pin system, it uses microfluidics, or the careful management of tiny amounts of a liquid or gas, to fill or leave bubbles on a planned tablet-like screen.

This isn’t the first device to create a tactile experience on touchscreens. The Phorm touch screen by Tactus is a touch-screen add-on that creates physical buttons using microfluidics, though it doesn’t specifically advertise itself as a tool for braille. Still, doing more with the technology is always good, and the Michigan team expects that, in a couple years when their devices is ready for commercialization, it will have a market beyond just those who need it to help with vision impairments.