IPads Changing Lives For Visually Impaired Students
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Ipads are making life easier for millions of Americans. Now teachers at a special city school say the technology is revolutionizing the way their students learn and interact.
As CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez reported, at one of the oldest schools for the blind in the U.S., nearly 300 students are learning to see the world in a whole new way -- each one has his or her own iPad, even though almost all of them are visually impaired. And some, like Jessica Karim, have no vision at all.
"Technology is changing all around us, and it's kind of great to be a part of that," said Karim, an 11th-grader at the New York Institute for Special Education in the Bronx.
Bernadette Kappen, the school's executive director, showed CBS2 how students have traded in old, clunky Braille writers for tablets that can do much more.
"It's an opportunity for them to be more increasingly more literate and to have material at the same time as their sighted peers," Kappen said. "You can have screen enlargement. You can have the voice-over for the totally blind."
Karim navigates hers with ease using a bluetooth-enabled Braille writer.
"Probably the best thing, as teenagers go, is you get to do your homework on the bus," she said.
Tenth-grader Kevin Figueroa is legally blind in one eye and can only see shadows and light with the other. But his lifelong dream is to make movies. And with his tablet, his dream is quickly coming into focus.
"I love it," Figueroa said. "I try and get every opportunity I can to go outside and shoot something."
The school is also using audio-enabled iPads to help teach reading comprehension to younger students. And researchers from Google recently spent three days on the Bronx campus studying how to make their products more accessible to the visually impaired and others with special needs.