Elizabeth Goldring Piene

As Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Elizabeth Goldring collaborated with MIT and Harvard engineers, scientists, physicians, designers and students to create seeing tools and visual experiences for herself and others like her with severe vision loss due to macular degeneration or other diseases of the cornea, retina and lens. Initially she worked with Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope inventor, Robert Webb, to turn the SLO into a “seeing machine” for her blind eye. Recently, using the SLO concept, she and her Vision Group have developed an affordable, portable, easy-to-use “seeing machine camera” prototype. It is currently being tested at a low vision clinic in the Boston area. The Group looks forward to making the “seeing machine camera” commercially available.

Seeing Machines, MIT Vision Group, 2010

VISUAL LANGUAGE FOR THE BLIND

The Visual Language for the Blind was developed in order to make basic English nouns and verbs easier to read for people with low vision or for people using Seeing Machine technology whose visual reasoning may not function well because of a prolonged visual impairment. In the word ‘door’ the ‘d’ and two ‘o’s cause interference which tends to make them indistinguishable from each other for people with low visual function. Thus, by replacing the double ‘o’ with an image that helps to convey the meaning of the word the new “word-image” becomes not only more legible but also more easily associated with its meaning. Goldring has drawn her inspiration for the word images from pictorial forms of writing including Chinese, Native American, Hobo, and Egyptian.  

Samples of the Visual Language developed in the Vision Group Goldring directed at MIT:

EYEDANCE, 2001