 So welcome to Big Talk of Small Libraries 2021, our 10th annual, and we are ready to start our first presenter of the day. Excuse me, of course, right after that, I get a little frog in my throat. Our first presenter of the day. I see a library creating equal access or vision impaired patrons. Kate Kozier, good morning, Kate. And she's actually from the smallest library on our agenda today. The smallest FD population served of only 650. Is that still correct? Yeah, that's correct. We've got to double check the populations. You never know. She's going to talk to us about helping our visually impaired patrons. So go ahead and tell us all about what you've been doing at your library, Kate. Okay, great. Well, welcome everybody. I'm very excited to be here. I'm a little nervous. I have four cats and a kid doing distance learning, running in and out looking for her math books. So I apologize in advance if it's a little. As we all are nowadays. I earned my MLS in 2016, but before that I spent 10 years in the blindness community. I have a master's degree in rehabilitation of the blind as well. And one of the things that I feel very passionate about is making libraries accessible to anybody who wants to use them. And I think there's a lot of, I don't want to say stigma, but there's a lot of confusion as to how visually impaired people can use the library. So I hope some of the things I'm going to share with you today will be helpful. I've tried to make this a little bit interactive, so we'll see how it goes. Please feel free to put questions in the chat. And here we go. So the first thing we're going to do is take a little quiz. You don't need to answer me directly, but just think about your answers to the following questions. They're all true or false. So true or false, being visually impaired means you can't see anything. True or false, only old people have vision loss. True or false, it is important to talk loudly to people with vision loss so that they get the message. True or false, people with a vision impairment cannot read print materials or access information. True or false, it is inevitable that we will lose our eyesight when we get older and nothing can be done about it. True or false, people with vision loss have much better hearing than the rest of the population. True or false, it is difficult and expensive to make things more accessible. So we're going to revisit these questions at the end and see how you did. Why does it matter that we work to allow visually impaired people into our libraries and make it a welcoming experience for them? First of all, it helps increase access to information to a large percent of the population. As you probably are well aware, I don't need to tell you this, but we are an information driven society anymore, whether it's personal information or public information. Everybody wants it. We all want it instantly. And the minute we have it, we need the next bit of information. Imagine if you have no access to any of that. Secondly, it reduces social isolation, particularly people with vision impairments who can't drive. They tend to be left home alone. They have a great deal of social isolation, fewer friends, that sort of thing. It helps provide a sense of belonging. In our community, we did a research project last year and one of the things that people loved the most was that when they came into the library, they had the sense of being home and belonging to something bigger than themselves. Vision impairment is common and growing in the United States as our population ages. 2.4 million Americans over the age of 40 are visually impaired. That's per the National Eye Institute. And that number is growing. Just in the last six months, my dad, who is rapidly approaching 70, was diagnosed with glaucoma. So, you know, you probably see this in your own families. So I'm going to show a short video here. It's about four minutes long. I made it myself on what it means to be visually impaired. Exactly what terms we're talking about. I do want to say I'm not a doctor. I don't have a medical degree. Nothing that I say or present can be construed as medical advice. This is simply like practical common sense advice, including in these videos. This is just for information. So hopefully this works. We'll see. Get out of here. Okay. So before we can really help our patrons with vision impairment. And is everyone able to see this video? Yep. Yep. We can see and hear it. No problem. Okay. There we go. Working good. We understand what vision loss is and what it does. So how do we define blindness? A person is considered legally blind if their central acuity is 20 over 200 or worse in the better eye with correction. Or if they have a 20 degree or smaller field of view in the better eye. That sounds like a lot. So let's break it down. What does that mean exactly? On the standard eye chart, you have different lines of text that you read up at the very top is a giant letter E. And it goes all the way down to some very small letters. Each line has a notation. So 20 over 200 is the big letter E. And 2020 is further down on the chart. 2020 eyesight is considered perfect. That means when an object is placed 20 feet away from you, if you have perfect eyesight, you can see it how you're supposed to. If you have 2200 eyesight, that means an object is placed 200 feet away from you. And a person with normal vision could see it, but you can only be 20 feet away from it before you're able to see it clearly. If that is the best line that you can read on the eye chart after correction, meaning using glasses, corrective lenses, or having surgery. And that is the best line you can read with your best eye, or you can't even see that line, you would be considered legally blind. Please note that if your left eye tests 20 over 200, but your right eye tests 2080, you are not considered legally blind because you're better seeing eye sees better than 2200. The other way someone can be considered legally blind is if they only have a 20 degree field of view or less. Some eye conditions steal our peripheral vision, meaning the eyesight we have on the edges of our field of view. You can test your peripheral vision by putting your hands up at the side of your face and staring straight ahead. Wiggle your fingers. When you see them moving, you are using your peripheral vision. If that vision starts to narrow and you develop tunnel vision down to a 20 degree field of view in your better eye, you are also considered legally blind. You could have perfectly normal acuity, meaning you can see 2020 out of that little tunnel that you have left. But because your vision, your visual field is so restricted, you're considered legally blind. From being legally blind, you can also go all the way to total blindness which is called no-light perception. You can have light perception, meaning you can tell the difference between light and dark, but you can't make objects out or really any variation therein. Total blindness is fairly rare, accounting for only about one-twelfth of the total visually impaired population in the United States, or roughly one million people according to the CDC. Okay, so we have now learned what vision impairment is in legal blindness. If you have any questions, I'm putting up a website here that points to the industries for the blind and visually impaired, and you can read up more on this topic. Otherwise, I'll be creating another video on common vision conditions and what they do. See it? Okay. So, are there any questions about that at all? No, no, no. Kind of waiting on it. Sounded good to me. I was actually checking my peripheral when it was telling how to do that. My camera, oh, I'm good, okay. I mean, if anybody has any questions, just a reminder, always type into the questions section for any of our presenters during any of the time when they're talking. It doesn't look like we have anything right now, though. Okay, great. And at the end, I'm going to share this website with you. So, you know, don't worry about taking a pile of notes. You'll have access to all this information as well as the recordings. Okay, so now we're going to talk about what the types of vision loss are and why they matter. This is a little bit longer video. It's about five or six minutes. But it's important to understand what you're likely to run into with your patrons who may be experiencing a variety of different vision loss. So, go with this one. Let's start by taking a look at a cross-section of the human eye. To the left of your screen, you will see the front of the eye. And towards the right-hand side of your screen is the back of your eye with the optic nerve leading back to your brain. We're going to discuss a number of eye conditions, and it will be important to know some of these parts. So, we'll take them in turn. So, let's start with cataracts. Cataracts impact a lens in the front of the eye when protein deposits form and cause a film that is difficult to see through. Cataract surgery is quite common these days, and the affected lens is simply removed and an artificial lens is implanted. The new lens, however, is not perfect. It cannot change shape to focus on objects that are close-up. So, many cataract patients still require reading glasses after their surgery. Here, you'll see two pictures, and it will give you an idea of what it is to have cataracts. The picture on the left is a small garden scene, as seen through, quote-unquote, normal eyesight. But on the right, you can see what it looks like as fairly advanced cataracts. Note that the image is very blurry and cloudy, and it's difficult to make out the details. Let's talk about age-related macular degeneration, or ARMD. Surrounding the inside of your eyes, a layer of cells called the retina. Inside the retina is a small little dimple at the back called the macula. The macula is responsible for all of your crystal clear central vision that we rely on the most. With ARMD, what happens is that the cells inside the macula start to break down and you see a blockage in your central vision. Let's look at a simulation of what ARMD can look like. Again, on the left, you'll see a picture of what someone or a quote-normal vision would see in looking at the little garden scene. On the right-hand side, you'll see what it might look like for someone with ARMD. Pay particular notice to the gardener who has suddenly been overtaken by a black spot, and that's what ARMD does, is it slowly works its way out, including your central vision. The bad news is ARMD will never take all of your eyesight as it does not impact your peripheral vision. The bad news is that ARMD has no known cure. Okay, let's talk about glaucoma, and of all the conditions we're going to talk about, this one is the most complicated, so try to bear with me. Again, we have our eyeball here, and in the very front of the eye is a small chamber called the anterior chamber. The anterior chamber is full of fluid called aqueous humor, and that flows in and out of the chamber to cleanse and nourish the front of your eye. When you have glaucoma, the drainage network there fails, and it begins to build pressure in the back fluid chamber of your eye called the vitreous. And as that vitreous has pressure expanding and expanding, it puts pressure on the optic nerve, just transmitting the signal from your eye back to your brain. When that happens, you start to lose your peripheral vision. Glaucoma is often called the sneak thief of sight for this very reason. Because it starts out in your peripheral vision where you can't see as well, you don't notice that you're having a problem. And that's why regular eye testing with an ophthalmologist is so important. There are multiple types of glaucoma. I don't want to get into all of that in this video, but I've posted a link here to the Mayo Clinic where you can go and find out all about it. Let's have a look at a glaucoma stimulation. We're used to the picture on the left by now, and on the right you're going to see what it would look like through the eyes of a glaucoma patient who has a pretty significant vision loss. As you can see, they've got a tunnel, and it has really narrowed down what they're able to see, but their central vision is still quite good. We're going to talk about today's diabetic retinopathy. This is a complication of diabetes. With this disease in the back of your eye, again the retina, is full of little blood vessels. They start to break open and link blood into the ventris. This causes little islands to float around in your field of view. Let's have a look at what that might look like. Again, a normal view of the garden on the left, and someone's view with diabetic retinopathy on the right. See all the little pockets where they can't quite see and how it does obscure some important information, like the welcome sign. And with that, we'll draw this video to a close. Know that these are not the only eye conditions your visually impaired patrons may have been diagnosed with, but they are the foremost common in the United States. As you prepare to welcome visually impaired patrons into your library, I hope that the tools I've compiled for you will be very helpful indeed. I hope this gives you some background moving forward to think about how to serve your patrons with vision loss. And please remember, if in doubt about any eye conditions you may be experiencing, go see your eye doctor at your earliest convenience. Thank you for watching. Okay, so any questions about any of that? I'm checking. No, don't look, we have any. All right. So with all of that in mind, the question then becomes, what exactly can I do in my library that is helpful for my patrons who are visually impaired? So I'm going to talk about some of the things that we did at Clifton and some of the things that you can do in your libraries. Let's start with contrast. So creating good contrast for your materials is super important. And let's see just exactly how important it can be. So this slide is an example of good contrast. The font is quite large. It's dark. It doesn't have a lot of, you know, there's no script. There's nothing hanging off the letters. It's crisp and clear and, you know, a good slide. This slide is also an example of good contrast. For many people who are visually impaired, they find that a yellow background really helps them to be able to read better. So when you are thinking about making slides or presentations or doing something at your library using yellow instead of white is a good idea as well. What do you think of this slide? Do you think that this slide is a good example of contrast or not? So the answer is yes. Of course, if you were doing some sort of printing, this is going to absolutely murder your black printer cartridge. For some people, it's actually easier for them to see the white letters against the black background. I even find that easier just for reading in general of just less glare. Yes, exactly. If you go back to this, this actually shows a good bit of glare which for people with trouble with lighting, it's slowly gotten darker. We do have a question about why is the yellow better yellow, that particular shade? Yellow actually really improves contrast by reducing glare. It seems to work pretty well for people who have dyslexia as well. So if you have other people with different issues, and I'm going to show you some ways to incorporate the yellow yourselves, but it's really a glare issue. You can just see the difference between the two. Of course, I also made this font a little bit bigger too, which doesn't hurt. Okay, so let's look at this one. And here you're going to see an example of very poor contrast. So we have kind of this body with red print on top. The font is small and it's in a cursive. So you can't see it very well at all. And that just shows that even though maybe something looks pretty, for people with vision impairment, it can be a big, big problem. And then I put the question here, why else might this slide be a problem? So think about that for one second. And I will give you the answer now is that the most common form of color blindness is red-green color blindness. So you are creating, let's say, a Christmas card or something for Christmas to put on your website. And you put red and green together also. And the color blindness is going to see is a big gray square. They're not going to see any of this. So that's important to keep in mind as well. Any questions about these slides? Let's see. We do have a couple of questions. Actually, someone has questions about cataracts going back to when you were talking about that. I want to know, do you have a blue lens on your eye when you have cataracts? Is that? Sometimes it looks very cloudy in there. It might kind of bluish tint, but it's just a cloudiness. And then when the old lens is removed, you get a nice clear lens again. And I want to know about the yellow. Is any shade of yellow? Or is that bright yellow specifically what we're talking about or needing? Or something that's not super bright. Like if you have a neon yellow, obviously that's going to cause headaches. So this is a pretty good shade. And a little bit further on, I'm going to show you a couple of products. And they are generally this color. You want a deep rich yellow, not a bright sunny yellow. So the shade does matter. Yep. Let's continue on then. So let's take a look at some of the library signage that we have in our library. This is a standard restroom sign. I took this picture from our bathroom door. And what do you think is good about this particular sign? This is a standard ADA sign. There's nothing wrong with it actually. It has bright white figures on a dark background. Good print and a good font. You can't really see it, but there's Braille under there as well. So this is a fine sign, ADA compliant. The best way to make it better contrast would be if the sign were mounted on the white wall next to the bathroom. It may be difficult for someone to spot this sign on the dark wood background. And so that would be a quick and easy way to simply move it over to where it's more visible. Okay, this is a picture of our library's entrance. And this is just proof positive that even though I know what I'm doing, I'm hardly perfect. So why don't we see if you can spot a sign that says library in here. And we have an information center, calendar, bulletin board, the book sale is going on. Somewhere in all of this mess is a library sign. And if you have found it, you'll see it's right there. The town put these signs up, the library is inside of the town building and every town office has one of these signs. So they don't want to change it because the clerk's office, the library, the town justice and the town museum, we all look the same. So what did we do to make it more obvious that this is the library? Even if you can't find that sign. And the answer is we put down this mat. This is something that I created, I didn't create the map, but I bought the map myself in order to help people realize that that's what it is. Our population in Clifton is primarily 65 and older. And many of them do have vision issues. The great thing about this mat in addition to the contrast of the white figures on the blue is that it contrasts really well with the floor. So, and that was just from like one of the standard library suppliers. So other places that you can improve contrast in your publications and newsletters, I was making a newsletter every two months using Microsoft publisher. And for some reason, when I was typing in the articles, Microsoft put everything in gray, it didn't put it in black. So all I did was change the font color to black. Same with creating brochures. Just use as, you don't need to use the bold setting but use as bold of a color as dark of black as you can get it. One of the things we did with our return slips, we had just a standard little printer that shot out a very poor quality slip. It was like light blue print on the white paper. And we started highlighting, just using a plain highlighter highlight the due date, or if somebody couldn't see it, you can use a sharpie or a dark pen and write it in there, as opposed to asking someone to sort of hunt around and try to find the, the actual date. I'm going to do a little workspace demonstration now. I think this is important. So hopefully you'll be able to see me on the camera. Can everybody see me now? Yep. Yep. We can see your camera view. Yep. So for this demonstration, generally there's two types of workspace. You know, you have your counter and it's either very dark or very light. So here we have just a simulation of a dark workspace. I have my black mouse pad on my dark workspace. And then I have my dark mouse. So if I have a patron coming in to use the computers and this is what they are faced with, that's a pretty difficult situation for them to go over to a computer, find the mouse and get to work. So the easy way of fixing this would be under the mouse pad. You can put a white piece of cardboard with the mouse pad on it and then have a lighter colored mouse. This is my ridiculous mouse. But as you can see, that's a big improvement. It doesn't require a whole lot of effort. You can also purchase if you have a light work surface, a light mouse pad, and a light mouse. The mouse shows up a lot better. But you could certainly add a darker mouse to that. And that makes it much easier to see. The price are pretty inexpensive, you know, $10 or $15. You can improve that dramatically for someone with a vision loss. Let's go back to this. Okay, can everybody go back to seeing the slides? Yep, I see the slides now. I have a question. Is a blue background the same as black? Like would that be like... Is a blue swap as well at all? It depends on the individual. Some people have actually found that using like a royal blue with yellow works really well. So, you know, it's really up to the individual and that's why it's super important that you ask them, like, have you found something that works for you? Does this work? Do you like the black? Do you like some other color? It's really very subjective to the person. And then on computers, as nice as it is for all of us to have a picture of our cats with these tiny little icons on your public computers, you may want to have just a plain blue background, large icons as you can make them and make it real easy for folks to be able to find that Microsoft Office area or the Firefox browser button or something like that. So, that's just a quick, easy and free way of making your computers more accessible. I'm going to talk more about computers in a minute. And then finally, eliminate visual clutter wherever possible. I know my slides are not the most exciting slides on the planet, but that's just to prove the point that there's really nothing to get in the way of your eyes looking at what's on the slides versus, you know, having a lot of images around and a lot of colors and that sort of thing. This makes it much easier for someone with a vision impairment to be able to enjoy what I'm working on. So the next thing we're going to talk about is magnification, meaning making things bigger. Magnifiers themselves should only be provided by a low vision therapist or an optometrist. The reason for this is because it's really for someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it's a guessing game. So you might know that John Doe down the street has a pretty serious vision loss and with the best of intentions hand them a magnifier you picked up at the drugstore and it will not work at all. So, you know, I know a lot of libraries have those little glasses that you can get at the drugstore that's fine for someone who's not experiencing actual vision loss who maybe forgot their reading glasses, but magnifiers should only be provided by profession. So don't waste your money buying a bunch of magnifying glasses. It's not helpful. So I'm going to show a picture of a machine here. This is called a CCTV. It was donated to a local thrift shop, the thrift shop called the Lions Club and said, come take this thing and the Lions Club called the library and said, we don't know what to do with it either you guys. So happily I knew how to use the thing. As you can see down on the tray at the bottom here we have a people magazine, and you can barely read it. But if you look up at the screen, you can see the headline, you can see the pictures, and it is a pretty great tool to have. They cost several thousand dollars. So the only way we were going to get one was to have them donated. But if you have a Lions Club or some other community organization that might want to be in your library, I think they're a worthy tool to have. We do have a gentleman that comes into our library. He has macular degeneration. The bigger the print the better, but he's only there in the summers and he's not going to tote his CCTV from Florida to New York every year. So he loves that we have it handy. And, you know, don't be afraid to get in there and play around with it. You can't help somebody learn to use this thing if you don't know how it works. There are some buttons on there that change the color. For instance, I don't have any pictures of it, but this will switch this image from white on white and black to white letters on the black print. And it'll make the pictures look like skeletons and all kinds of creepy, but it also does like blue and yellow and green and all different combinations to try to help somebody figure out how best they can see with it. If you have the ability to put one of these in your library, it might be super useful. It's also great for people who don't have a vision loss who maybe want to look at old photographs super close or postmark on, you know, their stamp collection or something like that. So it is, it is super useful. And here I'm just demonstrating you probably have seen this from a 12 point font all the way up to a 72 point font. Maybe you can't print your entire newsletter in the 72 point font, but you could perhaps publish it online that large. So you would have a like a vision friendly newsletter available electronically. Or if you're doing a PowerPoint, you can see the difference there. I've tried to use a pretty good size font versus a 12 point, which might be standard for a Word document. And it does make a big difference. So can you think of a potential problem with magnification. The big problem is that somebody has a visual field loss, like glaucoma, where it's the outside vision that is narrowing in, they actually need smaller images or smaller print to fit into that little tunnel. So handing someone with glaucoma under the best of intentions, a large print book, for instance, that may not be particularly helpful to them they can actually read a standard print novel. And that's why it's important for you to ask them what, what they need if they indicate to you that they're having some sort of vision loss, find out what exactly they need. So any questions about magnification at all. Okay, not about the process itself. But if you want to know more about the, that the CCTV that magnifier machine that you had there. What, like, actually the brand that it is or where to This one is called enhanced vision. It will magnify I believe up to about a 25 times magnification so you might only see the T and the word the there really goes quite large. You could write under it, you could paint your nails under it, you know, something you are struggling. I'll be purpose. Maybe not in the library but you certainly could do that. Where would someone purchase one of these. You could just look up CCTV for the blind in Google and, you know, certainly it would be easy enough to find a vendor. I can do that towards the end if we have, we have the time. I'm also going to give you my email address at the end so if anyone has once for their information about any of this equipment. You can certainly email me and I can help you find a vendor. We'll do it but you know, like any material they they sell these. Yeah. So is this one that you recommend or is there other ones. I mean you say you got donated is there at something better or is this pretty good. It sort of depends they're all standard, you know, happens to be enhanced visions model but there's some that are handheld. You know, that's nice there's some that you can hold up in front of you and it will magnify a screen from across the room which is handy like for college students who need to be able to pay attention to a lecture. I had a client once who I gave her one of those and she could see her daughter clearly for the first time in a long time. You can't stick a human being under this, you know, mounted thing but for one that's handheld you could certainly do that. So, there are a couple of different types, but I mean for a library this is totally fine you could probably get away with getting the cheapest one that you could but again we're talking. Even the cheap ones are $1000 so you you want to make sure you're going to get some use out of it. We were lucky to get this from the Lions Club. Yeah, so this one is called enhanced. Yeah, that's just one one product line. And, you know, contact every single state in the country has a commission for the blind they might have some that they want to get. But, you know, as the new ones come in they might have one that they want to get rid of contact them and see if you can put it in your library. Yeah. They're bulky and they take up a good bit of space so, you know, necessarily want old ones hanging around so. Okay. Now we're going to talk about lighting. This is our little library here you can see it's pretty bright except for the children's room at the bottom which has very poor lighting there are no windows in there. And so we had a couple floor lamps and we had a ceiling fan with some lighting on it but still the lighting is not great. So we're going to go through and talk about how you can make lighting better in your libraries. So good lighting helps to enhance contrast and can help people with vision impairments see better. And full spectrum lighting is often a way that you can add really great lighting, not that expensively, and it will really help so I'm going to click on this particular product. I do not advocate this particular product but this is the name brand off light, they were sort of the first and the best. So for $60 you can buy this little table lamp that somebody could sit at the table and have really good bright light. And I had a Google search up earlier, which unfortunately I restarted my computer and lost it but you can find these lights for as little as 20 bucks at Walmart. So you don't have to get this one they also make floor lamps. And that will do the same thing you could put that behind somebody's, you know, like if you have a nice upholstered chair you could put this over that and somebody could turn it on if they need better lighting than what you provide. So you can see these are considerably more expensive, approaching $200. There's probably not really a lot of need to purchase one for that amount of money when you can get them cheaper, and I've even seen them on Amazon. So, it doesn't have to be that much. So, so that is important, let's see. Bonus question is what's wrong with this slide. I put the light bulb picture in, could be very distracting for somebody who have a hard time seeing so what is a potential problem with adding extra lighting to a an environment. And the answer to that is that people who have some sort of some types of vision loss experience intense glare from too much lighting which makes it very difficult to see. So, one of the examples I use this cataracts if you remember from the video the image of the little gnome was basically obliterated by a cloudy film. And if you add lighting to that it makes it 100 times worse. And we've all experienced this if you drive, and you turn your wipers on and you smudge some bugs around and the windshield is not all that clean and maybe there's some dust on there. And you come around the bend and then you hit the sun and all of a sudden you can't see anything. That's what it's like to have a pretty advanced cataract and then have somebody put bright light on for you. So you want to bear that in mind that again by asking your patron how it is, does this help, maybe lighting isn't the best answer. So how much you solve some glare issues. Number one you can close the blinds, if you have them. You can provide an inexpensive visor I found the that Oriental Trading Company, you can get 50 visors for $25. And you can just have these suckers to hand out $22 even better and just allowing someone a break from overhead lighting as you saw in our picture we have pretty intense overhead lighting in our library. So that might help a great deal. And here's the yellow sheets that we talked about in the contrast section. You can provide these LS and S is just a disabilities product catalog, but they sell these sheets there's four of them for $6 and someone could put that right over top of their book magazine newspaper, and they would be fine for being able to see better. And you can also direct a patron to a less well lit part of the library for instance for some of our patrons the children's room actually is better for them. And you could provide indirect lighting so rather than putting a desk lamp directly on whatever it is they're working on have it off to the side so there's still a little bit of light coming in but it's not directly on their workspace technology. Actually, we have a few questions about lighting. If we want to. Yeah, while you're still talking before you. So is there a difference between fluorescent or incandescent light bulbs. And, and someone also I just like maybe a related question about what type of bulbs tend to help better. I find that. I mean I haven't been in the field in a while I do think that the new led bulbs do a pretty great job of making the light really bright. Great thing about fluorescence is that they're in those long tubes and so it's sort of a gentle diverse light that goes over a large area versus a light bulb that's concentrated. But if you have somebody that really needs a very bright concentrated light having that, even an inexpensive table lamp, if you can invest in the, the outlight or the full spectrum light, just having that bright light directly on what someone's trying to look at can be a big help. And so I had a question going back to the magnifying glasses or having the, the, you know, piece of equipment, which I missed earlier. Sorry about that. Why does there's been any difficulty with that because of the pandemic with COVID-19 do having, do they need to be quarantined? Are you doing cleaning of them? How is, you know, how would that be handled? Yeah, since we don't give them out in our library, we, we don't generally worry about it. I know the libraries I know that have done that. They are selling them for like a dollar or two and then people are just keeping them. Sure, sure. That way there's no like contamination. I think if I were doing it now, and I was going to keep the little glasses, I probably would clean and quarantine them, even though there's a very limited amount of, you know, contamination from surfaces. I think having something directly on your face, I would be a little bit more nervous about. Okay. All right. Great. Thanks. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to show you very, very briefly how to play with the settings on your computer. I am a Microsoft person. I'm not an Apple person. So I'm using a Microsoft thing. Apple has similar stuff you can play with. And also you can add these stickers to keyboards. I'm going to show you the stickers first. And then we'll look at the settings on my computer. So here we have, these are good contrast, but they're also super, super big. So look at the size of these. And for less than $10 you can get a set of these and put them on, even if you can only commit to improving the contrast and the size on one keyboard. I think this is well worth it. They do make different, you know, these are yellowish kind of fluorescent. There are just plain old white ones. There are white stickers with black letters. So certainly have options. Okay. And while we're out here, I'm going to click down here on my settings. And you may never have noticed this, but in Windows settings, there's actually something called keys of access right here. So this is all accessibility issues for helping people with both vision and hearing issues. So we're going to look at vision since that's what we're at. Simply dragging this makes the text a lot bigger. Look at the size of the text versus when it's on the standard. You can make everything bigger on the entire screen. So look how much bigger that got just with one click. You can change your contrast and brightness. So I have it on 100%. But if I had somebody in who was having issues with the glare off the screen. I don't imagine this is going to help too many people, but this is what it looks like with zero brightness. So those are just some quick ways without really needing to know very much that you can change the display. You can also change the size of your mouse pointer. So there we go. And you can see how big it is. You can change the colors. You can do similar things here with the text cursor. So if you're typing and you want to be able to see something really big and bright, you can change that. It has a magnifier. So if you turn that on, you can zoom into some part of your screen and it's much bigger. Turn that back up. It's difficult for me to use with my standard eyesight, but that's great for some folks who need it. You can change the color filters. Just keep messing around with all of this. So see here, red, green color blindness. They have filters for that. They do have blue, yellow, grayscale, all different things. And then you can make high contrast changes as well. And they have narrator, which will read the screen. So if someone can't see it, generally visually impaired people have screen readers. But if they happen to stumble into the library and need to use your computers, you could turn narrator on for them. So all this is available standardly with Windows. And I believe it's also available with Apple products. So other ideas, just very quickly. You can have a descriptive movie night, most DVDs now if you go to the subtitles menu, they have audio description. So if you're watching the aliens blow up the White House and Independence Day, it just sounds like a whole lot of noise if you can't see what's going on. But if you turn on the description, a little narrator will come on and say the aliens have blown up the White House. That's, that's a fun thing to do. And it's, you know, you can have a little movie night and welcome folks in. You can help folks sign up for the National Library Service. Probably most of you are familiar with that. You may not be familiar with the NFB Newsline, the National Federation of the Blind Runs Newsline. And what it is, is a program that allows visually impaired and print disabled people to call in on their phones and they will get national newspapers, their state newspapers, weather alerts, magazines, job listings. You name it, it's there. They have COVID-19 information now. They have an app. It works on Alexa. You can use their website. Once you're signed up, you can get all kinds of information for folks with vision impairment. So it's a really, really awesome resource. And I highly recommend that one. And then you can provide print copies of presentation. So if you have a speaker that's coming and you can get their slides in advance, print those out and hand those out to someone who maybe can't see a movie screen. So just some quick general etiquette. I know I'm running short on time here. I'm going to try to talk fast, speak directly to that person, the visually impaired person, not their companion. One of the most frustrating things is what does he want? Well, I don't know what he wants, but he knows what he wants. So speak directly to them. Remember, they're vision impaired. They're not hearing impaired. There's no need to yell at them. The vision with a guide dog, that animal is working. Please don't at or distract or feed that animal. Give specific instructions. So if someone says I'd like to use your computer, where is it? Rather than saying, oh, it's right over there, you might say, oh, it's 10 feet to your left. If you are using the clock directions, you can say it's at one o'clock, 20 feet in front of you. You need to be specific. You could also offer to offer that person your arm and guide them to where the computers are. It's okay to use words like see and look. I'm not really impaired. People use those words all the time. So someone comes in and says, I have a vision loss and I need some help. It's okay to say, oh, I see. No one's going to get angry about that. And when in doubt, just ask. So here are a few resources. I do have this tool of the rural libraries project. Everything I've talked about today is on here. The vision simulations are on here. Everything is on here as well as links to other other resources. So please feel free to use that. You can also call your state agency for the visually impaired and they can point you in correct direction. I've showed you the National Federation for the blind. There's also the American Council for the blind. They have tons of information. The Helen Keller National Center. If you have a patron who's deaf and blind, they can help you with that. And of course your local Lions Club. A big part of the Lions Club mission is to serve people with vision impairments. These two tough customers here, the one on the right is my dad. And the one on the left was my ninth grade English teacher and they are showing off a vision screening device that they use in our local elementary school. So they're happy to help with the library too. So back to the test. Every single one of these is false. If you do. I've talked about with contrast and lighting and magnification and everything. It would cost you less than $100 to book up your library for the visually impaired. So here's my email address. You can email me in time. And I thank you very much for your attention. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Kate. Yeah, we have some other questions, but we are running short on this hour. So definitely reach out to Kate. If you have any questions, you do want to ask of her. Her slides will be available with the recording afterwards. And someone did ask about the rural libraries.org that link that website or that you had. Sure. That's just that's for anybody to access. That's not something that's you just out there publicly for anyone. Correct. Yeah, that's not a that's not an ARSL thing or anything. That's just something that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And just lots of good questions. Great session. People learn so much great info. So I was very impressed by all of the computer options and things that you can do on your computer. Thank you for watching. Whatever said that Chromebooks have that same accessibility tools available. So yeah, there's lots of ways that people can do this. Yeah, definitely. All right, I am going to pull back presenter to my screen. Thank you so much for being with us Kate. Yep, thank you everybody.