Kaisa Penttilä

What Would You Like to Tell about Yourself?

I am visually impaired, I live in Espoo and work as an IT specialist. I became blind as an adult. The cause of my blindness is retinitis, or macular degeneration.

I have two adult children, spouse, and a young guide dog, Clara, who is still in training. I am a handicrafts enthusiast and run a handicraft company where I also consult

I work for the Finnish Association for the Visually Impaired as an IT specialist. My special expertise is assistive technology for the severely visually impaired and blind.

What Is THP?

The former Information Management Services, now Information Services, was established in the early 1990s to reduce the problems of access to information for the visually impaired. Many sectors have started to develop the possibilities for the visually impaired to receive up-to-date information.

What Is the Mail Robot and How Did It Come into Use?

Mail robot is an old name for peer support channels for the visually impaired. It was an email mailing list service, the social media of its time. The mail robot was introduced in the 90s and the idea was that visually impaired people can get messages from other visually impaired people, why not from others too, to their own device. There were lists on many different topics such as formula ones, culture, visually impaired parents – today there are more than a hundred discussion channels.

How Did a Blind Student Take Notes before and after the Third Transformation?

The third upheaval must be briefly explained here!
Before computers, notes were taken in Braille. In my day, we used a braille machine, which is quite heavy. There were also dictation machines, but before electronic devices awls and boards were used as note-taking devices, and they still hold their own.

Awl’s idea is simple: braille paper is placed on a board with braille lines. One braille character consists of six dots. With an awl one writes to the wrong side of a paper from right to left. In meetings, support notes are still made in this way.

When PCs came along, awls and other devices began to fall by the wayside. Computers were big, so in the early 90s Memona, an electronic note-taking device, was developed.
Memona used Braille. It could contain notes from multiple days. The text file could be edited at home by connecting the device to a computer. In the past, one had to transcribe notes taken with an awl; that stage of work has fallen away.

How Big was the Impact of the Transition from DOS-based Computers to Windows?

(will the title be changed to make it smoother?)
A bigger transformation was the transition to DOS machines. Before PCs came along, punched tapes were used in programming. Programmer was a popular profession among the visually impaired.
Then came the display screens, and there was confusion about how a visually impaired person can use them.

The vocational school for the visually impaired had innovative activities and teachers who developed the first screen reading programs. In the early 90s, synthesizers were obtained for DOS, which turned text into speech. They were like space sounds, but they were understandable.

MS-DOS was command-based and everyone had to remember a lot of syntaxes. It was equal. We made our own scripts that could be used even when blind.
We were on an equal footing, but again there was a transformation when graphics and mouse came. A seeing person no longer had to remember the syntaxes, one just clicked what one wanted.

Then graphic screen readers were developed. They were no longer tried to be developed in Finland, because the transformation was international. Memory was burdened by keyboard commands, no longer by syntaxes. What a seeing person does with the mouse, we do with the keyboard with different key combinations.

How Did the Visually Impaired Get Access to Newspapers?

Shall I say who, what, where? Should we mention THP or who passed these magazines on to customers at the time?

Already at the end of the 80s, Etelä-Suomen Sanomat (“Southern Finland’s News”) could be transferred directly from printing house to the homes of the visually impaired. The transfer was made using the data transmission techniques of the time. Reading work has always been done only at home. Our programs edited the raw text sent by the newspaper house as desired, i.e. deleted images and arranged articles by department if necessary, and then the magazine was delivered to customers for listening on home computers.

Attempts were made to develop a wide variety of channels for the transmission of magazines, even a television text channel was tried. When the modems came, the visually impaired retrieved the magazine from our server with their own modems. Transmission technology has advanced tremendously. The first transmission of a Hesari (Helsingin Sanomat) took almost an hour, now it takes 3 seconds.

Different operating systems have their own reading programs. When the magazine comes to the reader, they scroll through the main menu and listen to the articles they like, for example, from the culture department, etc. Once the articles are on the screen, all your own tools will work: synthesizer, magnifying program and braille display.

Now we are going through the next transformation: a reader device is no longer necessarily needed, but the magazines are recorded as an audio file and streamed to a terminal. They are read by a synthesizer, not by a human being. The editorial staff of the magazines send the materials and the programs of the Information Services of the Association for the Visually Impaired automatically modify them to their streaming condition. A large number of visually impaired people can listen to their magazines already before eight o’clock in the morning.

How Websites Could Be Read?

The first web solutions were such that a message was sent by e-mail to a web server, which gave the page as text to us via e-mail. One continued through a link. As the web and browsers evolved, Explorer, Netscape, and other browsers were used. Even today, html code is an atlas that a screen reader interprets and runs based on it. As a user, I can ask it to find the element I want.

If, As a Visually Impaired Person, I Needed a Map of a New Area, What Options Would I Have?

If I want to act as independently as possible, I take the map in 3D from the Touchmapper.org website. I look for the needed area in Google Maps, change the scale if necessary and save. I can print the map for example in a library. One does not need any help with this, as long as there is a 3D printer in the library and someone can help with 3D printing. It would be good to have visual assistance so that I do not uselessly print a sea, for example.

If there is no such possibility, I will contact the Printing House Of the Association for the Visually Impaired, Taktiili. There, the map is made at an affordable price on sparkling paper. It is paper that elevates dark spots. The retouching of the map is done in Taktiili by a competent person and it is sent to me.

I can also make my own master for the sparkling paper. I need enough vision to be able to draw the map lines on normal paper and darken the appropriate fields. Even then, it must be taken to be printed.

There are different versions of 3D maps: from Itäkeskus (in Helsinki) one gets a two-color map, so that it helps even the visually impaired. The given address is indicated on the map. If this level is not enough, there are companies that make maps for shopping centers, for example. As a model, I have a map of Sello (a shopping center in Espoo), where the pins show, for example, elevators and doorways. The map has been fixed a bit. Stairs has been deliberately widened so that they can be found with one’s fingers. Pedestrian crossings have been omitted for clarity. The different heights of the buildings are also shown on the map.

How to Make a Relief from an Image?

It depends on the purpose the relief is needed for. For example, a drawing of the base of a house can be obtained from an architect as a picture. I take it to Taktiili, where it is printed as a picture on sparkling paper. As with a map, one can get a relief from the image so that the dark spots rise up.

The Celia Library has various reliefs that can be lent to schoolchildren and others too, for example, learning material about animals and mathematical patterns. For the relief of the coat of arms of Helsinki, a master has been made of wood, which has been pressed on plastic film.

3D is one way to make an image tactile. In the technique, an image is made into a relief that is modeled to be elevated. For example, the relief from the Mona Lisa painting is quite accurate, but the atmosphere and all the details cannot be included in the picture.

These need to be modeled by humans, these cannot be scanned. To do this, there are free modeling programs, the use of which is not rocket science. However, it is a process that requires human labour. After that, the file can be delivered for printing or printed by oneself.

What Do You Need to Consider When Planning a 3D Print?

The easiest way is to go to a company that does the work. For example, 3D images of children are made in such a way that the camera has circled around them. Plastic and epoxy-coated sandstone have been chosen as the material for printing.

One must also have some kind of an understanding about what can be made into a 3D model. For example, it is difficult to make a hollow object, but it is easy to model external shapes e.g. with an automatic scanner. There are also online groups where you can get help from modeling enthusiasts. For example, for the 3D model of Olavinlinna Castle, it has only been necessary to choose a ready-made model and send it to print. The material is selected at the time of printing, it is not of importance at the modeling stage.

What Could an Exhibitor Do to Help the Visually Impaired Get More Out of the Exhibitions?

In a picture exhibition, audio description is the first thing to do. Audio descriptions tell you what is essential about the image, such as colours and moods. In addition, if possible, tactile elements could be made for the exhibition as a 3D print or on sparkling paper.

It would be relatively easy to make a relief from, for example, the work Huuto. So that one would get a little sense about how big the mouth in the painting is in relation to the face.

It is always difficult to turn a two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional object. What things are raised for palpation? It is much easier to make a scale model of a three-dimensional work.
It must be remembered that miniature models should not be too large. The work must fit in two hands.

Text: Anna Lassinketo