How the blind can feel the solar eclipse in real time at this Indianapolis event
Visually impaired people will be able to experience the total solar eclipse as it happens via a tactile tablet at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The first group of people who are blind or visually impaired to experience a total solar eclipse in real time using a new device called a Cadence Tactile Graphics Tablet at an event in Indianapolis, Indianapolis, will be part of a cohort of 16-year-olds who can't see the moon obscure the sun in a real time event. The tablets, created by Lafayette-based Tactile Engineering and partner NearSpace Education, allow blind and visually impaired individuals to experience the eclipse in a virtual real-time, allowing them to feel the sun's edge and the moon's surface without needing to be seen. The event aims to remove or reduce barriers to learning and social activities for visually impaired students. The tablet's creator, Wunji Lau and David Schleppenbach, has been working with students at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on experiments to test high-altitude balloons launched from the speedway shortly before the eclipse. The technology allows students to use the tablets to interact with science experiments and navigate menus on the computer.
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How the blind can feel the solar eclipse in real time at this Indianapolis event
Jazmine Nelson and Minerva Pineda-Allen will gather with thousands of others across the city on Monday, brimming with the anticipation of witnessing a cosmic event that only occurs in the same place about every 375 years.
The teens won't actually see the moon obscure the sun, but they will be in the moment — part of the first cohort of people who are blind or visually impaired to experience a total solar eclipse in real time using a new device called a Cadence Tactile Graphics Tablet.
At 3:06 p.m., as the crowd at Indianapolis Motor Speedway looks to the sky, the 16-year-old girls will be there to lay their fingers on the tablets to feel a smooth-feeling moon inch toward a spikey-feeling sun before covering it entirely.
They won't have to ask a sighted person where the moon is. And they won't have to wait for photos of the day to be processed and printed in a tactile-friendly format. It's a major step toward carving out their own sense of belonging at a massive social event that emphasizes sight.
"It's so important for people to realize that this device is more than just a device that they're making — it's a device that they're making to enable accessibility and inclusion," said Jazmine, who is sensitive to light and can only see lights and shadows.
This particular event has long been in the making for the Cadence tablet's creator, Lafayette-based Tactile Engineering. With partner NearSpace Education, which is based in Upland, the organizations will not only provide a way for blind and visually impaired individuals to encounter the eclipse, they'll also offer an education experience that makes it more enriching.
The groups have been working with students at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on experiments to test in high-altitude balloons that will launch from the speedway shortly before the eclipse. One goal, organizers say, is to find innovative ways to remove or at least reduce barriers to learning.
Another goal is for the students to share in the communal act of standing in the path of totality in the center of Indiana — a social activity that won't come around again in our lifetime.
How the tablets help people feel images and animations
Behind the Cadence tablets students use at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired are decades of research. As graduate students working in Purdue University's Visions Lab in the 1990s, Wunji Lau and David Schleppenbach wanted to build a prototype that would provide a full-screen display to help visually impaired students.
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Although their initial technology didn't work out, Lau said, the duo teamed up with friends and fellow engineers, and in 2013, Schleppenbach, Tom Baker and Alex Moon came up with a product that hit the right balance of capability and affordability. Mass-production was the next hurdle, and in 2022, students started using the units.
The tablet is about the size of a thick smartphone with 384 dots that pop up and down — refreshing in real time as they're fed animations, streaming data, scrolling maps, video games and the like. When paired together or in groups of four, the display broadens. The dots' spacing and finger-pressure resistance is optimized for Braille readers as well.
"The big problem for education, especially for people with blindness and visual impairments, is just getting access to materials that they need to learn and work — textbooks, graphics, images, animations," said Lau, who is Tactile's director of marketing.
The tablets connect via Bluetooth to computers that run Cadence software, and an iPhone app is currently undergoing testing. Teachers can send images to multiple students at once, and students can use the tablets to access files and navigate menus on the computer.
Among the many avenues the technology opens up are science experiments that put out tactile real-time data that remove many of the limitations of large printed books with charts.
The joke on a recent Friday morning is that the class will send up a student's new iPhone 15 in a high-altitude balloon on the day of the eclipse.
"What would maybe be some ways you could protect this phone since we already know your mom would not be happy if your phone breaks on the way down?" asks Brandon Pearson, NearSpace Education's STEM director who is leading the class at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Pearson continues: Would the phone get too cold in the air? What might protect it? A discussion about insulation ensues.
The iPhone 15, of course, will not ascend in either of the two high-altitude balloons that Pearson and the students will let fly Monday. Instead, they have bestowed that honor on a Dr. Pepper, Monster energy drink, egg and sour gummy worm, among other items. Using the tablets, students will collect data like temperature and movement during the flights and test hypotheses about the objects after the balloons land.
In the earth and space science class, the students brush their fingers across the devices, feeling a graph that dips with the expected change in temperature as the balloon rises. The dots refresh for each new image, clattering like the sound of Nerds candies being poured onto a table.
"The biggest purpose we have for these balloon launches is just giving these students a way to participate and do authentic STEM research in an extremely dramatic learning environment like a total solar eclipse with the whole goal being that through (being) involved in some of this, we're sparking some ideas, we're sparking some imagination, we're piquing some interest in these kids — like, 'Hey, that was really cool. What does it look like for me to maybe do something more like this as a career later on?'" Pearson said.
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Pearson and students worked on a test balloon release in October, using the tablets to examine the altitude and direction, Minerva said. She is sensitive to light, unable to see out of her left eye and can detect objects but not details in her right.
"It enabled us to actually feel what was happening as far as the altitude and how far up it was going and exactly which direction it was going. That was a real-time experience — being able to feel where this balloon was going and what exactly was happening to it and not just having somebody tell me, 'Oh, it's going up 50 more feet,'" she said.
"I'm finding this information out by feeling it."
For the solar eclipse, NearSpace Education and Tactile Engineering will pull feed from NASA to display on the tablets. No strangers to Indiana weather, the partners have backup plans via telescope and streams from elsewhere in case of clouds or rain.
The technology makes the eclipse a shared journey and not just a story a sighted person tells later on, said Ann Alvar, who teaches science at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
"We naturally filter and select things that are important to us from our environment, but if you can't see it, it has to go through someone else's experience," Alvar said. "So as much as we can get them to be the primary person in the experience as opposed to filtering it through someone else" the better.
While the cosmic event will be awe-inspiring on its own, those who work with the tablet call it a jumping-off point for a more welcoming future. Students at the school already congregate regularly for the Cadence Club, where together they play games like table tennis and the maze.
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The tablets' usefulness extends into the workplace, too, Lau said. Engineers use them to track airflow, and cybersecurity and computer science professionals keep up with data movement and Internet activity. For today's students, the eclipse — and the STEM lessons that manifest on the tablets — could pave the way to more education and careers in the future.
"We have the eclipse that's happening, which is great, but (Tactile and NearSpace) are trying to leverage like, OK, what's next?" Pearson said. "You get these kids interested, you get these kids excited — how can we maximize that afterwards?"
If you go
What: Total Solar Eclipse Event presented by Purdue at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. NearSpace Education and Tactile Engineering will have an area for blind and visually impaired adults and kids, their families and assistants.
Sign up and find more information at tactile-engineering.com/eclipse. Signing up helps the organizations provide enough tablets. Admission is free for blind and visually impaired registrants.
Otherwise, regular admission to the speedway events is $20 for grounds access and $300 for Pagoda Club suite access. Find tickets at indianapolismotorspeedway.com/events/eclipse.
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Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or [email protected]. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.