Welcome to the #Outreaching Blog!

On Thursday, December 5 and Friday, December 6 Jen and I attended the Provincial Outreach Program for Students with Deafblindness (POPDB) District Partner Conference in Richmond. Robbie Blaha from the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired presented on Exploring Appropriate Programming for Students with Deafblindness. Robbie took us through some of the fundamental str ...

On November 22 and 23, PRCVI and SET-BC hosted the Children’s Low Vision Project of BC (CLVP-BC) Lower Mainland clinic. CLVP consists of a series of assessment stations that students move through. They are able to be seen by an optometrist, educational specialist, orientation and mobility specialist, assistive technology specialist, and ophthalmologist. In recent years, PRCVI ...

Last week Jen and I partnered with one of our colleagues to deliver a new presentation in a middle school classroom on Unified English Braille. In order to draw connections to the Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies curriculum the features of UEB as a code are examined in relation to other codes, namely HTML. The students in the class were familiar with braille at an intro ...

Recently I had the good fortune to travel to a school to collaborate with a colleague and her student on using stovetop adaptations for cooking. Late last year Jen and I had visited and we worked together with the student and his TSVI on preparing simple snacks (chocolate pudding and fruit salad) that he could prepare at home. On this visit, we practiced using the tactile marki ...

Adam and I were discussing Chromebook accessibility recently as part of an outreach visit. Chromebooks, like most modern operating systems, has many built-in accessibility features that may not be obvious. Here's an overview of some of Chromebook's accessibility features as they relate to students with visual impairments. Magnification Chromebooks have several ways of enlargi ...

On Friday afternoon Steve Barclay from Canadian Assistive Technology presented to our O&M Sharing Session on the new Victor Reader Trek from HumanWare. We've created a page on the PRCVI site with all of the resources, links, and handouts from that day. This page not only includes Steve's presentation about the Trek, but also all the fantastic resources shared by O&M spe ...

Last week I attended the Annual Meeting of the American Printing House for the Blind. PRCVI has makes many APH products available to our TSVI colleagues in BC through the library catalogue. It is always great to see what new items are on the horizon and to provide feedback to APH on existing products as well as product ideas for development. Some of the new products on the hori ...

Webinars can be a helpful resource to learn about technology, especially when they provide detailed step-by-step instructions for how to use programs. Freedom Scientific has run paid webinars for many years, but has recently made archives of these webinars available free to everyone. The previously paid webinars now available for free include: PowerPoint 365/2016 with JAWS ...

Over the past month, PRCVI has been exploring ways to extend our coding project. This past week Colton and I had the opportunity to explore some of our ideas with a high school student and her teacher of students with visual impairments.  Apple developed the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad to teach programming concepts and the Swift programming language through interactive ...

We are always keeping an eye out for accessible STEM resources here at PRCVI. Desmos is an online graphing calculator that is accessible to students with visual impairments. Desmos allows graphing of expressions and includes full support for screen readers, including audio feedback for graphs and braille support (both Nemeth and UEB). To get started with Desmos, here are a fe ...

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