Inspirational video

Tuesday, the last day, I was excited as we watched an inspirational video of stories of success for people with disabilities who have excelled in sports. This video was phenomenal in demonstrating that it is not only hard for disabled people to overcome and live typical lives, but also it is even harder is to do sports, adventures, or simply to have fun. On the contrary, how excellent they are when being able to do that. Their perseverance is higher than normal people. When they do sports, most of them rely on assistive technologies to function. Even though they are relying on assistive technologies, sports require talents and overall fitness which is hard for them to develop as well.

The video “How A Blind Teen 'Sees' With Sound”.
Ben Underwood as seen in the video is a blind teenager who lost his vision at the age of two as a result of a surgery that removed his eyes because they were affected by cancer. Currently, he lives a totally normal, independent, and successful life and is able to play video games, ride a bicycle, play basketball, skate, swim, and play with his siblings by clicking a sound and identifying objects’ distances by echolocation. He is able to do all of this because he relies on his ears to identify the echo sound. Upon the first viewing of the video, I was thinking and assuming that there must be an assistive technology involved with that, but surprisingly there was not, and Ben depends on Echolocation by his mere ear as found on these additional videos:

He clicks by his tongue, and the objects would bounce back those sounds of clicks differently so that he is able to figure out the sizes and the distances of different objects from the distinctive sounds of their echo. As defined in Wikipedia “Human echolocation is the ability of humans to sense objects in their environment by hearing echoes from those objects.”

Another website explaining human echolocation is found here.

Additional information about human echolocation can be found in this website.

He was influenced by his mother’s powerful role in encouraging him to make good use of his other senses since the beginning of his disability. His mother also has developed in him the pride and the strong will and perseverant attitudes which had a great impact on his success and thriving.
Though Ben was not mainly relying on assistive technologies to find his way or to play, he mentioned in one of many videos I found and watched about his life the use of some technologies such as adapted computer, talking calculators, textbooks on tape, talking dictionaries, and many other electronic devices that are available for blind people such as the ones mentioned here. or here.
Another set of blind assistive technologies are available here.