An unforgettable experience. From the moment I received my personalised luggage bags packed full of Team SA kit, to the very last day at the athletes village in Birmingham, we were treated like gold.
I felt incredibly proud & honoured to represent RSA as the first female visually impaired (VI ) para triathlete, with my guide Trish Heimann, at the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
It’s difficult to sum up the experience in just a few words with so many great moments. One of the most memorable being the opening ceremony. It’s everything you’d imagine it would be and more. The goosebumps I got when our country was called & the feeling of sheer excitement when we all walked side by side singing Shosholoza.
Meeting athletes from all around the world, including top SA athletes. Just spectacular.
Racing on the 31st of July was challenging but it was the fun part; it was the reward of all the hard work, dedication & self-discipline. I loved every minute!! Finishing 5th.
It was an event beyond belief so I say, follow your dreams, believe in yourself and don’t ever give up!
Linsay Engelbrecht is the visually impaired triathlete and Trish is her guide
Congratulations to Gavin Kilpatrick together with his guide, Casper Moodie for his phenomenal result in 7th place in the Men’s Para Triathlon – Visually Impaired
New PhD study enhances assistive technology for the visually impaired
The link to an article which the Stellenbosch Engineering faculty published about Reinhardt’s PhD earlier this year:
The idea for my research topic came about due to my own experience as a blind science student at university. When I started attending university in 2009, I found many of the more mathematically oriented modules difficult to understand because of a lack of accessible mathematical study material. Although the books were available electronicly, they were filled with equations and diagrams, both of which were in a format not readable by the screen reading software that blind people rely on. As a result, I had to make use of sighted tutors for many of my subjects, who aided me in transcribing the material to a format that I could access. This was very time consuming during an already demanding course, combined with the effort of self-advocacy generally required by disabled students. I therefore decided, on the recommendation of my supervisor, to focus my PhD studies on a method for accessing graphical material in a non-visual way.
The method I developed is based on the concept of sensory substitution, which is the mapping of information destined for one sense to a form which can be understood by another. In particular I used audio-visual sensory substitution, the mapping of visual information to sound. My method is an extension of the vOICe method developed by Peter Meijer (he has a website describing his method at seeingwithsound.com.) The vOICe works by mapping each column in an image to a tone chord, so that bright parts of an image produce a sound, and dark parts are silent. The chords are then played one after the other, so that, for example, a diagonal line from top-left to bottom-right will sound like a descending tone. I extended the vOICe method by the incorporation of gestures on a touch screen, which allows blind readers to explore diagrams by sliding their fingers across the screen. For the second part of my study, I investigated whether blind readers would be able to also read equations with my method. I was able to show that it is indeed possible, which may be useful to allow blind readers to transcribe mathematical content themselves. However, I must emphasise that the first prize would always be material produced by publishers in a format already accessible to everyone, i.e. born-accessible material.
