× Expand Olivia Wright, counting giraffes

Olivia Wright has a sleepover tonight, but she’s agreed to meet with a reporter first.

“I’m exploring a table,” she explains, her tone formal as she begins the demo. “There are sound lines around each cell of the table.” She drags a small finger across the glassy surface of her tablet, triggering a series of beeps, then listens carefully. “There are seven giraffes,” she announces, “at the Saint Louis Zoo.”

Wright is 9 years old, and she’s managing fourth grade beautifully, but doing math in Braille sucks. The textbook winds up being five heavy volumes, hard to lug if she wants to do homework in the car while her sister has soccer practice.

“A typical math book will be many volumes in Braille,” explains her dad, Travis Wright. Math is far harder to teach when kids can’t see, though; a quadratic equation has to spread itself across multiple pages, and shapes all have to be drawn in dots.

Except when they can be conveyed through sound and vibration, using special new software, on a lightweight tablet that refreshes its own data.

“It can be tables, bar graphs, anything,” says Jenna Gorlewicz, who developed this software for her Ph.D. dissertation at Vanderbilt University.

× Expand Olivia with software developer Jenna Gorlewiscz

“I’d been doing medical robotics work, and I was looking for something that directly involved people,” explains Gorlewicz, who’s now assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Saint Louis University. “I was working in the Nashville public school system…”

One day, she met a girl who wished she could be an engineer.

“Why can’t you?” Gorlewicz asked.

The girl’s brow furrowed. “Don’t you know? I can’t see.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean you can’t be an engineer.”

“But math and science are really hard for me, because they’re full of graphics. I can’t sit in class and learn that way.”

A home embosser to convert all that data to Braille would cost too much and be too cumbersome, Gorlewicz knew. There had to be a better way. She started exploring haptics—gaining information through touch. What if she could use everything phones and tablets already do—vibrate and make sounds and translate text to speech—to make learning easier for kids who weren’t able to rely on vision?

The software product is called ViTAL, and Gorlewicz is now looking at ways of adapting it for kids with cognitive disabilities or learning disabilities, giving them information through multiple channels. Eventually, ViTAL may also be useful for kids with ADHD or a disorder on the autism spectrum.

I ask Olivia what she’d improve about her new tablet.

“Hmmm. Maybe…I don’t know. Really, it’s pretty good the way it is.” She nods vigorously, her pink headband glowing under the fluorescent lights. I ask how different the tablet is from her math books.

She turns toward her father. “They’re pretty thick, right, Daddy? I don’t usually know thick and thin. They’re heavy though, and they have kind of thick pages, ’cause there’s Braille on both sides.” The tablet, on the other hand, is sleek and exciting: “I like sounds and stuff. And the vibrating. If we use this, it makes math just a tiny bit funner.”

A minute later, her face lights up: She’s thought of an improvement. “I wish it was waterproof! And I wish tablets had Facetime. There’s this thing called Google Hangouts…”

Gorlewicz grins. Right now, she’s more focused on refining a site where teachers and parents can easily feed graphics and text into the software.

“Does it tell you what time it is?” Olivia asks innocently. The grownups keep talking.

The software is just a downloadable app, Gorlewicz says, so you can use any tablet. She provides people with an overlay of raised dots that create a border to orient the user.

Olivia traces the border with her finger. “I also like it to vibrate when I’m on the outside of a chart,” she adds. “If it didn’t, I’d be totally lost on the screen.”

Gorlewicz nods. “It’s like being lost in touch-screen space. Because the whole screen is flat, which is very disturbing.” She’s figured out ways to guide users (a voice announces when “the image is loaded,” for example), and when sound is most effective, and how to make sure continuous vibrations are subtle and not too buzzy, and how to vary them for different lines on a graph…

“Education is moving to the digital space,” she says, “and we need to make sure we’re not leaving people behind.”

I nod, scribble, eventually close my notebook. As we say our goodbyes, Olivia politely asks the time again.

Her sleepover is starting.