Category
SKERI Research Recognized with the Dr. Arthur I. Karshmer Award for Assistive Technology Research
February 24th, 2020
We congratulate Dr. James Coughlan, Dr. Huiying Shen, and Brandon Biggs, MDes on winning the Dr. Arthur I. Karshmer Award for Assistive Technology Research with their publication that aims to harness smartphone-based technology to query information about a multitude of objects in users’ daily lives.
SKERI researcher awarded grant to study echolocation
February 1st, 2020
Santani Teng, an Associate Scientist at Smith-Kettlewell, has been awarded a three-year grant from The E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind and Visually Impaired to study the neural processes of echolocation.
Brandon Biggs brings his assistive technology ideas to SKERI
January 30th, 2020
We’re excited to welcome Brandon Biggs to the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. Brandon arrived in August to collaborate with Dr. Coughlan, Dr. Shen and Dr. Fusco to work on assistive technology research and development. This collaboration started last year, when Brandon met Dr. Coughlan at the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER) International Conference in Reno, Nevada. Brandon was then enrolled in a Master’s program in Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, which he completed in June.
SKERI scientists release Tactile Graphics Helper app for free download
September 30th, 2019
TGH (short for “Tactile Graphics Helper”) is a free iOS app from The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute that makes tactile graphics available for people with visual impairments. When you point your finger at a feature of interest on a tactile graphic, the app issues text-to-speech information about the feature.
The app is available
on the Apple App Store, and instructions on how to use it are here .
In Memoriam: William F. Crandall, Jr.
May 24th, 2018
Smith-Kettlewell Hosts International Symposium at CLADE Meeting
January 22nd, 2018
Jampolsky Fellows Reunion 2017
August 23rd, 2017
On Thursday, July 27, 2017, the 43rd annual reception for the opening of the Jampolsky Fellows Reunion was held at the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, San Francisco. In attendance were 33 fellows, in addition to many spouses, hailing from Baltimore to Buenos Aires to Brazil to Basel to Birmingham. A truly eclectic group of pediatric strabismus ophthalmologists!
Relaunch of YouDescribe
May 22nd, 2017
On May 18, 2017, in honor of the sixth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Smith-Kettlewell relaunched the award- winning YouDescribe with new features, expanded capabilities, and exciting possibilities for the future of audio description. YouDescribe is a free web-based platform for adding audio description to YouTube videos to improve accessibility for the blind. Conceived in 2011 by Smith-Kettlewell scientist Dr. Joshua Miele in 2011, YouDescribe is a unique platform that allows sighted describers to add audio description to any YouTube video and share those descriptions with blind viewers.
Dr. Preeti Verghese Awarded NEI Grant
April 25th, 2017
Congratulations to Senior Scientist, Preeti Verghese, Ph.D., who was awarded a four-year grant from the National Eye Institute to study ways of assisting patients with age-related macular disease (AMD) in the performance of real-world tasks. Dr. Verghese’s research lab examines the neural processes, strategies, and adaptations that humans use to interact with objects in the real world and apply these to visual adaptations in clinical populations.
DescribeAthon 17 ‘Marathon’
March 10th, 2017
On January 26, 2017, in San Francisco, the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute’s Rehabilitation and Engineering Research Center (RERC) hosted DescribeAthon 17 — an event that used the Institute’s YouDescribe technology, developed by scientist Dr. Josh Miele, to raise awareness about video accessibility on the web for blind viewers. YouDescribe is an enhanced video program for YouTube in which recorded voices describe what cannot be seen.