Very interesting - from Dave Reneke's latest newsletter (Dave.Reneke@SkyandSpace.com.au) (posted without permission - hope you don't mind Dave
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She allowed the blind to ‘touch’ the stars
When she was an undergraduate astronomy major at Boston University in the mid-1980s, Noreen Grice got a work-study job taking tickets at the Hayden Planetarium N.Y. For a space geek who had grown up learning about the stars by looking up at that same dome, this was something of a dream job, a chance to see, night after night, what the city lights wouldn't allow - the breathtaking visual beauty of the astronomical canvas.
A month into her job, as she was welcoming people to the theatre one day, Grice was surprised to notice a group of blind people in the line. Astronomy is about seeing, and Grice worried they wouldn't get much from the show. She was right. When she asked them what they thought of it, they told her they were disappointed.
This bothered Grice, who, having been raised by her mother and grandmother understood what it was like to feel left out. "All the other kids at school had fathers, I knew what it was like to be stigmatized."
Grice left the theatre that day with a curious mission: She was going help those who couldn't see the stars find a way to touch them. She had heard there was a school for the blind in her town area so she found her way to the Perkins School for the Blind. At the school library, she located a couple of Carl Sagan books transcribed into Braille, but they were missing the most important feature - pictures. A librarian informed her this was because raised pictures were very expensive to produce.
Kenneth Janes, an astronomy professor at BU who was Grice's advisor, remembers the day she walked into his office and announced her plans to create an astronomy book for the blind. "My initial reaction was, 'How can you get a blind person to appreciate something one thinks of as only a visual science, perhaps the most visual of all sciences?'
Grice was determined and created a rough draft of a book - it was a technical challenge to figure out how to create tactile images, which she did at first by literally carving the planets and constellations into plastic sheets by hand.
Janes figured the idea would simply end up as one of those class projects that goes nowhere. When Grice returned to Boston and published the book with the title, ‘Touch the Stars’ it sold out, and the idea has snowballed.
‘Touch the Stars’ is now in its fourth edition, and Grice has continually refined the image process so that the printed images rise off the page at different heights and textures to convey more feeling. At the request of other astronomers and even NASA, she's published similar books on the moon, the sun, and the images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Earlier this year, she released her latest book called "Touch the Invisible Sky," and it deals with those things in the galaxy that can't be seen by the human eye. Grice gets emotional when she recounts the response from those she's helped to see what their eyes won't allow.
"I'll go to conferences and kids will come up to me and say 'You got me interested in astronomy and now I want to be the first blind astronomer on Mars,' " she said.”I feel really humbled when the kids ask me to sign their book, even thought they're not going to see what I wrote. It's important to them, and it's important to me."
Boston Globe
Some more links:-
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/s...ish_308230.htm
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/TOUCH.html
