Hubble Space Telescope Images For The Blind

Anonymous Coward writes "Paraphrasing this article from CNN: An astronomer and a science teacher for the deaf and blind have teamed up to make Hubble images accessible to the unsighted as well as the sighted. Hubble images are presented in full color, with raised plastic overlays. Information is written in text and braille. Each image has it's own key so that visually impaired readers know which texture represents which color or object. The blind sutudents who helped refine the book were excited to have this type of information presented to them. Early Hubble images helped persuade me to pursue an advanced degree in astronomy. It's hard to imagine what it would be like to be blind from birth and "feel" space. I'm sure it's much different than a sighted person's interpretation of space, but probably no less spectacular."

For those of us who didn't read it yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit Timothy, you ran this same article yesterday [slashdot.org]. Please everyone, post your comments to the discussion already going on from yesterday [slashdot.org].

--the real jeezus, posting anonymously to stay at the karma cap...

Re:Useful?

[PD]

Your argument is not persuasive, because of the following weakness:

If you list all of the possible ways that you can help the blind, you find that you can sort them by order of importance. Right at the top of the list is the MOST helpful way to help the blind. Immediately under that is the second most helpful way, and so on.

Your argument is resting on the idea that one should spend money on the most helpful thing. There is only ONE most helpful thing in a ranked list, so that sensibility, universally applied, would result in starvation of many other important functions.

You may still be right. Spending money on HST images for the blind might be a waste of money. But your argument doesn't convince me of that.

Same article/link as yesterday...

[Tower]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/05/164236
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Re:Useful?

[SIGFPE]

His argument also seems to suggest that there is one single answer for "how to spend money for the blind". Blind people are people like anyone else. If they want to buy this book they will and there'll be lots of reprints. If they don't it will be dropped. What does it have to do with him?
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Useful?

[Carlos Laviola]

Without trying to sound mean or arrogant, is this useful at all? Spending money on this kind of bullshit? I think the blind would rather have this money going to more helpful places [nfb.org].

Re:Useful?

[4thAce]

The best is the enemy of the good. [cybernation.com] -- Voltaire

So what is the absolute best application for the visually-impaired which has not been developed? And is it so obvious that making images literally "tangible" isn't one way of accomplishing that goal?