Today@Dal

Hundreds of Dalhousie University engineering students displayed their vision Tuesday of how to make life easier for the blind.

Living up to the ethos of the new Halifax Central Library that shushing is kept to a minimum, the first-year students showed the prototypes of inventions they came up with after being paired with clients from the CNIB.

A pebbled rubber mat for use at construction sites after one client said his cane often misses sawhorses set up as barricades.

A knife block with a cord attached to both the block and the knife handle so, if the knife is dropped, it can be picked up without accidentally grasping the blade.

A wire-mesh face shield that attaches to a backpack, designed to keep low-hanging tree branches out of the face of a walker.

The idea to work with the visually impaired came from first-year engineering professor Holly Algra, who has a friend who works with CNIB, and who put Algra in touch with a client.

“Then she found other people in the community with vision loss, who agreed to act as clients,” Algra said.

There are more than 400 first-year engineering students at Dal, coming from all over the world. One multinational group worked with a client who wanted to improve his guitar playing.

“Imagine trying to play the guitar without being able to see where your fingers are on the fretboard,” said spokesman Connor Patterson. “When we talked with him, he said he had no problem identifying the first four frets, so we began at the fifth one and implemented different indicators on every second fret. They’re all different shapes and textures, so there’s a smooth, flat square on the fifth, then a rough triangle on the seventh, a smooth circle on the ninth and a rough strip on the 11th fret. He can feel the shapes with his thumb and know where his fingers are relative to the back. It’s a relatively simple solution for a difficult problem.”

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