Imagine a Person Who Is Blind Using Second Life…

Last night’s ISTE Speaker Series presentation was, in my opinion, one of our most memorable and fascinating to date. We were joined by Louise Later (SL), a Second Life developer working with Virtual Ability, a Colorado-based startup developing products to help people with different type of disabilities to use Second Life. In real life, Louise is a writer and credentialed preK-adult teacher who volunteer at LARRS (Los Angeles Radio Reading Service). She also co-produces “Access Unlimited,” a radio show about issues involving disabilties, on KPFK 90.7 FM, Tuesdays, 3-4 pm PST.

Louise’s radio voice was crystal clear as about 30 of us watched and listened intently throughout her explanation of her background, how she got into Second Life, and like so many of us, how she connected with the best and the brightest in her field, including the folks at Virtual Ability and Simon Stevens from Wheelies.

It was incredibly powerful to hear Louise recount her discovery of Second Life and how she overcame obstacle after obstacle with relentless (dare I say, dogged?) enthusiasm, inspired by every triumph, to continue exploring, learning, and sharing for the benefit of all.

Max, as she would explain, started life as a “sled dog” she found for free inworld. Immediately recognizing the symbolic power of a guide dog and what they mean to the visually impaired. She knew that a virtual one would have the same impact in Second Life, and she was right. She fashioned a harness herself and began tinkering with Max’s scripts, and that’s where the fun began.

Through experimentation and work with others more skilled than her, she added more and more features to Max. Remember, Louise is legally blind, she has a condition called “keyhole vision” (also known as cerebral tunnel vision) which greatly restricts her eyesight (one eye is completely blind). Here, Max is about to “follow” an avatar:

This, in itself, was a gigantic leap forward for Louise, enabling her to easily accompany her friends in Second Life as they explored. But the next thing she demonstrated was truly breathtaking: braille in Second Life!

This object, when clicked, actually reads braille-encoded objects in Second Life using the inworld voice chat. Amazing! It made her demonstration of EVA, a text-chat-to-voice tool, seem ordinary in comparison!

To be sure, these tools are in a very early stage of development. This is a great example of what I find most fascinating about Second Life; here, educators are literally part of cutting-edge research and development in virtual worlds, dreaming, designing, testing and using tools that may, some day, change the way millions of others interact in virtual space. It was a truly humbling, empowering, exciting hour. The full photo set is here. (We’ve just GOT to get our voice recording system up and running on ISTE Island, it is a terrible shame Louise’s talk was only shared with those present. Take heart, though, I am told she will be back for a Thursday night social soon, and we will have more time to talk with her!)

For more about accessibility in Second Life, click here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Accessibility.

Kevin Jarrett

Helloooooo, all. Scott Merrick, here. I’m Scottmerrick Oh in Second Life and I blog frequently at my little Oh! Virtual Learning effort. I’ll be doing some cross-posting when I feel that’s appropriate, but this little introductory post here is mostly to let you know about our blogging resource at ISTE Island, the Blogger’s Hut. Designed to be informative and fun, sorta the way learning should be, it’s there for any and all educational bloggers, not just those of us covering our favorite MUVE. There’s a brief inro to blogs, there are links to videos, and there are now two windows of blogbuttons so that you can go find new blogs for your RSS feed aggregator simply by browsing the blogs that result from clicking the buttons.

Every month, a polling station collects votes for the featured Blog-o-the-month whose RSS feed will be displayed all month in the RSS object, allowing quick scan of subject headers. Clicking on the RSS box will open up the featured blog for your reading enjoyment. This month, it’s Jeff Agamenoni’s “From Mr. A to Mr. Z” and I’m pleased that Jeff (Henny Zimer in SL) is not one of your long-running blogstars, but a relative newcomer to the discipline: That’s the beauty of democratic vote, ya’ll! I love Jeff’s fresh-from-Montana perspectives on teaching and learning and the wonder he shares with us as he discovers new tools for teaching.

Come see me at ISTE Island, where I occasionally docent, along with the dozens of other teacher-volunteers who do so, and by all means vote for your favorite blog for RSS display the month of September: This month we’re choosing between four stellar examples of leading edge thought about teaching and learning. The predictable thing to do, of course, is to list them here, but I’d rather have you visit this SLurl and check them out!

See ya at SLCC!!! Oh, and if you can’t get there, I’ll be streaming some sessions into ISTE Island from Tampa. Either way, I hope to see you there!!

Posted by Scottmerrick Oh (Scott Merrick)

One of the more surreal aspects of Second Life is having a vivid voice chat conversation with a character where their mouth never moves. For years, avatars at There.com have had lip sync or at least, mouth movement, to audio.

Well, my Second Life talking friends, you can have that too with the Second Life Lipsync Viewer. This is a set of files you download and replace in your original Second Life application (see the bottom of the docs page and the Readme that comes with the download).

Now your lips move with the volume of your voice! Here is a brief test (it did not work with my dog avatar, so I had to play a human)

If you like this, vote for it to be rolled into the regular viewer.

A simply amazing new way to navigate Second Life.

To learn more about Mitch Kapor’s hands-free navigation read here.