Abstract
Presented in alphabetical order, the following grouping of articles comprises JVIB’s Scholarly Research Digest feature, where I draw readers’ attention to interesting articles related to visual impairment that have recently been published in other journals. If a reader would like to call my attention to a paper that they found interesting, they can email it to
I find it interesting how people present different versions of themselves and their lives when they have a substantial online presence. Much has been made of the “influencer,” who presents a carefully curated version of their life on social media that is significantly different from their lived reality. So it caught my attention when I came across this article, by Brylla and Emara, about how people who are visually impaired might craft the presentation of themselves and their disabilities when creating online content—something the authors call “strategic self-representation.” Unfortunately, the article did not deeply explore the psychology of the issue, as I might have hoped, but it was, nevertheless, an interesting read, and it made me think about an issue that I had not considered previously.
As an undergraduate student, before I transferred into education, I spent several semesters studying chemistry, so I was intrigued when I saw the topic of this article. It did not disappoint. Authors Bülbül and Aslan detail several innovative physical accommodations that an instructor might find useful when teaching the periodic table to a student who is blind. In addition, the article presents an instructional pedagogical framework that could be employed for teaching the periodic table, and related topics, to students who are blind. I will also note that this article came out of Turkey—a country from which I have seen a lot of innovative pedagogy related to visual impairment over the past year or so.
An article from the Brain Sciences Special Issue on Advances in Speech and Language Research for Cognitive Well-Being in Aging explored the effects of an intervention for people with visual impairments and dementia. As an increasing percentage of the global population becomes elderly, one can expect that more and more people will experience this dual limitation. Given these unfavorable statistics, I was happy to read an article that explored a proven therapy for people with dementia and assessed how well it would work for people with visual impairments. In keeping with the positive news, the intervention worked fairly well. Authors Tsang and colleagues found that the seven participants with visual impairments, with whom they used cognitive stimulation therapy, showed significant gains in several cognitive areas, as well as in language measures.
This article will be an interesting read for individuals who, like me, had never heard of “blind colleges.” In reading the article by Zhu and colleagues, I learned that, in some developing and underdeveloped regions, the concept of a school for blind students has migrated up the academic chain to the university level. And yet, according to this study, the students with visual impairments who are attending these blind colleges tend to want more inclusive educational experiences.