 Doesn't tell you what to do with them, doesn't tell you to give them extra time to cross the street, doesn't explain any further, but it's progress. At least it's in the driver's manual now. Oh, busy, busy page. Okay, so electronic travel aids. Susan had mentioned verbally about a Moet sensor. That's on your bottom of your screen dead center. It's that black and white picture. It was a sonic sensor. It would send out information depending on which way you had the selector switch for the person's thumb is. It was in a lovely, like that harvest green color that your old appliances came in. And really it would send out a signal whether a short focus or a longer focus, basically like in Star Trek, it'd be like your long range sensor or your short rate sensor. It was to be used in conjunction with a cane. You would use it to wave back and forth to explore if there was an object in your path or overhead. Obviously, it came and has left mostly because it's been replaced by newer technology. It's then not the first. Other ones that have been like it up on the page, you can see on the right hand side, there's the BAT-K sonar cane. And you see that one was clipped onto the cane. There was also something called the laser cane at one point, but that has gone the way of the dodo. And if you try looking up laser cane, you're just going to learn about Parkinson's and quad canes. So that's not the same as the laser cane. The laser cane was very similar to the BAT-K sonar. Above that, there's the mini guide that would be similar, just a smaller handheld version. There's the ultracane, and this one's still available for purchase, the ultracane. I've played with it. It's a big handle attached to a white cane. And again, it's doing the same thing. One lead sensor that shoots out a further beam, one that's narrower. So depending on which one that you're checking out, you can get the vibration feedback in your handle depending if you're about to walk into a chair versus maybe a door that's much further away. That's a jar. Yeah, the proximity glasses. It's a concept product that's being pushed out on the internet currently by Videre. I have no idea where that is. Maybe it's Spanish. But it's very similar to the eyeglasses. That's the one on the top left-hand corner. Both of them are doing the same thing that the ultracane, the BAT-K sonar, the mini guide and the mode sensor. There's a built-in way of it sending out a signal and reverberating back to the device, the glasses in this case, and it will vibrate and let you know whether or not you have found an object that's in your path. It's just with the glasses, you're now pointing your head in various directions as opposed to pointing either a small handheld wand or the cane itself. The only two that are different on this page. Oh, I put eSight glasses on there. They seem to be very popular, but they're not an O&M tool. They are a low-vision tool, and it doesn't belong in an O&M circumstance. So I know some people got all excited that maybe the eSight can be used to drive with answers. No, don't do it. eSight is not for O&M and it's not for driving. I actually don't even know if there's actually a relevance to the classroom because most kids don't want to look like Jordy LaForge and have big glasses on anyways in the classroom. But the two on the page that are different. There's the wee cane on the far left side. This is not a fancy tool like the others where it sends out a proximity alarm. It's actually a measurement tool for the O&M instructor to help correct the student's gait and find out if they are holding their cane at midpoint. Really cool. We had a demonstration on that about eight years ago in Calgary at a workshop. It has got my mind churning about all sorts of assessment applications, but really it hasn't moved really very much from the conception stage from the manufacturer. Bottom one, the spot stick. That one's interesting because it looks like a handle attached to the cane, but it actually picks up, if I understood correctly from reading it, it actually is picking up on a sensor in the room that will announce to you where you are and that they use it on the bus system. It actually will announce to you the various bus stops you're at. Very interesting device, but obviously not here. Oh, those were the trends that have come and gone or should really come and go or some may be stuck around, but haven't for very much. The practicality of a lot of them, they're expensive and a white cane is much cheaper. Here's the area where there's been great growth and really practical applications. The original Trekker Maestro, that's the one on the left-hand side, that has a palm pilot with two other gizmos. One of them was the microphone. The other one was the GPS receiver. It was cumbersome, awkward. Thankfully it was replaced eventually by the company of Humanware with their Trekker Breeze model and all in one type of thing. They had also offered a GPS module to go with their Braille Note, whether it was the original M-Power and then later with their Braille Note Apex. The bottom center, the Captain, whether it's the older white model or the slightly newer revised black one, that was a product that was out about five years ago as well to compete with the other ones I've already mentioned. Oh, the tactile Braille compass has been around for decades and not very well used. I've only played with one myself for less than a handful of experiences, but very dependable if you're teaching gift cardinal directions. It's a really good tool. The smartphone at the top, really the one up there from Mobile Geo. I think that's on a BlackBerry platform or some other thing. Obviously, as smartphone technology has taken over it, all you guys know that the iPhone has accessibility features and maps. I know that some of my former students have used this. In fact, I had a student who replaced his Trekker Breeze completely practically by just using the iPhone. Yeah, here's great leaps and bounds. From the original talking GPS where the guy in California, I remember the picture of this, he had a big giant backpack with 2N10A sticking out the back and he was wearing headphones and the short little video I saw was him walking up with his cane and having this huge backpack on with the battery pack and everything. And then he had a conversation with a bus driver, but he knew where he was because his GPS was talking to him through. Maybe we've come a long way, baby. That's all I can say. Okay. When I mentioned the Wii cane, they're made by this place, the Touch Graphics people. And they do a lot of things for orientation mobility. They got some great technology talking models that they have programmed. So raise tactile diagrams with auditory built into them, tactile maps, I mean, even the use of 3D models well before anyone else was doing that. And then they've done some research stuff. This is really cool stuff. The talking tactile head, it doesn't have an application at this moment in orientation mobility, but they're working on this bust of a head where no matter where you press on it, it will announce to you left eye, right eye, nose, cheek, ears. So think of a 3D model of a building and now you can actually press on various windows and it will tell you what floor that is or where the east entrance is. Smart grips are cool for people with three-ball palsy or other contractors, so those are really neat. Anyways, there's their website. I suggest you go there and just look at the stuff they have. There's stuff for Teacher Division in Parrot with educational implications, but then there's also all these cool things for orientation mobility. Touch Graphics. Okay, here's a brief soapbox. Of those five books listed there, I haven't read the last two, The Mobility Matters and Cain Confessions. I just ran across them when I was pulling this presentation together. I found this, I found her website, I found a really great audio clip. Which I've given a link to and I really actually want to buy both volumes. So maybe that will be on my wish list. But I've read the other three and although they tell stories of various people who are visually impaired, what I really at the time clued into and really liked was how they got around, how their orientation mobility skills were a journey, literally. A process of them learning how to get through their environments. The first one, the Cock-Eyed Fellow. It's funny because with RP, similar to the Lady with the Cain Confessions and Mobility Matters, having RP and losing your vision over time, the reliance on those O&M skills need to ramp up. But then they also like to think of themselves as a sighted person. So a very interesting little story. So if you haven't read any of those books, pick one and read it. But if you have a moment, go to the last lady, Amy Bouvard's Cain Confessions. There's a 50-minute clip. And the main thing that I pulled out of that that I was really interested in was her revelation, her personal revelation of, well, why don't I use my white cane inside somebody's house? There's this perception that once you reach somebody's home, the cane gets folded up, pushed in your backpack or put by the door and then you're left to do sighted guide. And her little story is she's very much left to fend for herself in this house where there's tripping hazards galore and dawn on her as, well, why didn't I use my white cane to not trip over this lady's oxygen tank and cord and stuff like that and not fall down the stairs. So interesting, I'd really like to buy her books. Okay, so, so box number two. I didn't know where to fit this in in my whole presentation because I'm rolling pretty fast. There's a lot of slides to get through. So here, a use of ID cane for children with low vision. As you know, in this province, we have a lack of O&M instructors and a lack of O&M service for kids who are more severely visually impaired, blind and conversely, that means the kids who are low vision who still need O&M training are getting even less service. On average, I was seeing at the peak, kids with low vision being seen anywhere from, I don't know, three times a year, maybe once a month. They were really close in proximity to O&M instructors, whereas the kids who are more severely impaired, blind, were either being seen once a week or once a month or somewhere in between. So the kids with low vision, not seen as much. And the further they were away from any C&IB center, the less service they got. Well, what happens is then the kids don't know they might be using an ID cane for street crossings. And I have in my role as both a TDI and an O&M instructor, I've been parachuted into a couple of situations where, okay, here's just one story, for example, a grade 12 student who, low vision, he actually himself had advocated for getting some training. So the school board then, at that time, I was working for the consulting service model. That school board brought me in at the $50 fee an hour or whatever it was back then. And I did some O&M training with him specific to White Cane, how to use it, street crossing, even though he had lots of great vision in his school and didn't need it to get around. But he was tired of almost being hit by cars. He had had, if I remember correctly, five close encounters with cars, and actually one time the key got clipped, and he got scared enough that he, by grade 12, recognized the need for an ID cane. If we don't introduce an ID cane to a child before junior high, then you have the whole host of complex junior high attitude to have to deal with in trying to get them to use an ID cane. I had come across an article, I can't remember if I posted it or not, it's not in this presentation, but it talked about how the success rate of low vision kids in crossing streets, when they're trying to use like one of those high visibility safety vests versus the success rate in using a White Cane, much higher with the White Cane, very low with the red vest. So just one of those plugs I'm putting in there, I know we don't have a lot of O&M instructors. It's great for me to say that we need to have more training for kids with low vision, get them an ID cane in their hands. The problem still exists of, well, how do we get them trained? And we'll chat about that towards the end. Okay, other soapbox, Susan had mentioned echo location. For those of you who have no idea what echo location is, I mean, you learn about it in every O&M course, and not in the way that Daniel Kish uses it, but echo location is just the ability to listen to your environment and use the sounds to figure out where you are as an environmental clue. You hear the pop machine running in the hallway as you're walking to the office, you know, you're about halfway. You're just using echo location to hear it. Your cane, if you are not a constant contact person, this one doesn't apply as much because you're always getting feedback, but if you're a capper, the two-point touch, you get a lot of tap echo back from your walls, and you can use that information to navigate better. What Daniel Kish does is, as he's described it, you can call it echo location when you're actually talking to them. He calls it active sonar. He makes a tongue click, and he changes his tongue click depending on the environment and what he's trying to get back information from, and he has honed his skill where he rides bicycles, walks around, jogs, does all sorts of amazing things. Now, in his older age, older, I mean, he's a little older than me, he's gone back to using a white cane. He even had a guide dog at one point in his life, too, but he is one who uses this active sonar to get information from his environment and actually be able to discriminate between the size and type of a vehicle, different styles of trees, the different construction materials of buildings, the differences in fences. It's really amazing, and so there's a little YouTube video there. That's very funny. He appeared on PopTech, and so he's actually quite funny for the first 10 minutes or so, and then he goes more serious and shows some video clips. If you've never understood what his version of Echo Location is, click on the video. He has come to Alberta before. There's been students who have had their parents arranged through FFCD, the family supports their children with disabilities, to pay for him to come and train them, and then the role of the O&M instructor becomes more complicated because now there's another instructor who's teaching a different skill set, and when Daniel is not there, how do we as an O&M instructor enforce what Daniel's taught so the kid can use it effectively and not lose it? So anyway, Echo Location. This comes up an awful lot in listservs and in discussions. Insurance in Canada, if any of you have subscribed to AER, the Association of Educational Rehabilitationists in Blind and Visually Impaired, I honestly, it's a national association of Canada and the US, and you should belong to it. There's lots of email information through them about various issues in Teachers of the Visually Impaired as well as O&M, and a lot of times this comes up. Now in the States, this Forest T. Jones and Company, they provide private practitioner insurance for O&M instructors. Not in Canada though. So a decade ago when I was investigating this for myself, I hit that brick wall and then ended up trying to figure out if there's a Canadian equivalent. I emailed the CNIB and asked who do they use nationally, and I had gotten some information back in the day in pursuing it. A lot of paperwork because it's not the norm. It's not an easy thing to define. They want a lot of background information, and in the end I got bogged down with all this amount of paperwork that I gave up doing insurance, and every time I practiced O&M, when I've been under the auspices of the school board, I've always been covered by ATA, so that was always the benefit of working for a school board as the O&M instructor slash TBI. We could chat more about that later, but that's all I got to say about insurance at the moment. Okay, so another soapbox moment. Susan mentioned dogs versus canes. So this is a quaint little soapbox movement. We're kind of unique in Alberta in that we've had pockets of students, high school students or even junior high students who have had a dog, and this is unusual in most of North America. It's funny, one of the dog schools that placed the majority of dogs with the students here in Alberta, they're a dog school who's operating both in British Columbia and in Alberta, and they started in BC, but it's funny, as far as I've understood from my colleagues in BC, there are no students in BC who have been placed with a guide dog. When I went to the Seeing Eye school out in New Jersey, and I asked them what's the youngest and what's the parameters around that, and they said the 16 would be the youngest, which means high school, and that's only the rarity. So for us to have had seven students, all of them north of Red Deer to have had dogs is an anomaly. It's not the norm. Now this is a fun one too. I'll get back to guide dogs in a moment, but this is a real thing. There actually are guide ponies and guide horses. I'll only spend a minute on this one. I can't remember if I actually took this picture back in 2011 with my Blackberry, or if I just had this sitting in my archive from someone else, but it was the first time that I had actually noticed a guide horse or guide pony. It's a real thing. There are advantages. They live up to 40 years doing the service as opposed to the 8 or 9 or 10 years before a guide dog has to be retired. Yeah, and also I didn't want to write it on the screen, but you can also put those little baggy diapers on the guide pony, and their lovely little horse apples will fall into the baggy. Much easier to clean up than your guide dog who has to be taken somewhere. Yeah, there's other things that can talk about guide ponies, but because they're so eastern seaboard and so not around here, I'm not going to talk about them anymore, but this was one of those trends. Okay, so getting back to guide dogs and the White King. Not every province has this. Not every place in the states has this, but we have this in Alberta, a blind persons rights act, and it has been tweaked in the last decade and a half. It's interesting. I got at the bottom of this page a little reference to British Columbia, since I'm doing a little comparison game here. They had, their older act was called the Guide Animal Act, and it's funny how that Guide Animal Act had a small byline in there about white canes, and that's where that quote came from at the bottom of the page. It says, in the old Guide Animal Act for 1997, it said, a person who is not a blind person, according to accepted medical standards, must not carry or use a white cane. And that was about it for their little byline on white canes. They replaced that act. Like, totally the Guide Animal Act doesn't work anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. And it got replaced with BC's Guide Dog and Service Dog Act, which then covers not only dogs used for orientation mobility, but also for all those other ones. They increased the fine from the old act from 200 up to 3,000, but they dropped any mention of the white cane. So really, there's no legislation in British Columbia about white canes. So I guess with the old act being gone, if you in BC want to carry a white cane around, even though you're not blind, there's no law against it, I guess. But there is an Alberta, technically. So back up to the top of the page, our Blind Persons' Rights Act was amended in 2004 to basically tweak the fines. I've got it buried in there. It says the fine of $250 used to be only $25. So that means if someone was impersonating a person who's blind and has a white cane, they would have had a $25 fine. So picture somebody who's panhandling, holding a white cane, people feel sorry for them. $25 is a small amount to pay. So they upped it by 10-fold. Same thing with, for example, the guide dog part at the mid-page. If somebody, TaxiCab, for example, wanted to deny access to the cab because he got a guide dog, they in theory could get fined up to $3,000, whereas back in the old days it was $300 and the court proceedings would have just been overwhelming for the person who was the dog user and probably would have given up. So they gave this a little more teeth. Interesting in the act, the wording is interesting. It says, and this is the quote from the middle, nothing in this section is talking about the rights of the dog guide user. Shall be construed to entitle that person, the blind person, to require any accommodation, service, or facility in respect of a guide dog other than the right to be accompanied by the guide dog. In other words, they can't start demanding that they have the right to a bowl of water, that they have the right to let their dog use the lawn too. They can't demand that. Most places are really accommodating and let that happen, but that's not what the act speaks to. Oh, and if the guide dog is not behaving himself or herself, if the person who uses the dog can't control the behavior of the guide dog, all of their rights in that act pertaining to guide dogs is moot because they couldn't keep the dog under control. This just reminds me of a brief story about my wife saw a person with a guide dog and the guide dog would urinate all over the auditorium when they were in class. Those are the kind of instances where the person who is the dog owner doesn't have the dog properly controlled. Okay, we've got 15 minutes, moving on. We talked about ID Canes. For those of you who don't know what a telescoping cane is, it extends. A quad cane for the visually impaired is white. It could have a red bottom, but for those who also have mobility issues but also are trying to identify themselves as being visually impaired, mobility canes in the bottom corner on the right there is what you mostly see, but then there's these things called the AMDs, the adaptive mobility devices. Susan knows more about the Kinetic cane, which is an older model to this and she had her husband build one, and I still have that, faithfully have that shown up to some schools occasionally. This is just the modern version of it. It's for the kids who have more difficulty holding onto the device, or you can use them as a training tool. Okay, so those are white canes. Here's the fun things that are new. Your standard golf grip has now been augmented by various other grips. The one above, that's the horizontal one, that's from Comdi de Renda. I just thought that was a really cool looking cane. They're using, as you can see, a wooden grip, but they've got green section, green cord, and they have all sorts of other colored canes, and that's just cool. And if you really want to buy one online from Germany, go right ahead. But it was available in Canada through Ambutech. You've got the golf grip that's black. You've got the wooden one. You've got now the newer cork one. It's got a different feel to it, a little bit warmer and forgiving. And then just launched in the last year and a half, all these colored ones, and it comes with the appropriate tip that also is colored matching. The colored canes are a great way to get them to want to have something a little more fun. And speaking of that, colors, huge colors. Now the one on the bottom with the funky flower pattern, again, that was from that Berlin site from Germany. So that's kind of cool if you want a cane that's got a wooden handle with flowers ordered from Germany. But otherwise, all the ones above are what Ambutech offers. So you can get your cane with a combination of black, blue, gold. You can see the whole list there. The only one I'm going to point out is someone with the two red stripes, and it's got the little arrow pointing to the poster. Because Ambutech actually supplies to places around the world, it's probably why they offer the wooden handle one, because obviously there's a market for it in Europe. The canes that have the two red stripes mid-shaft up the cane, in some places that's identified as deafblind. So in the United Kingdom and in places of Europe, Spain, that means deafblind. There's also additional places where an all green cane would mean low vision, which I thought was very interesting. That I think was Brazil or somewhere in South America. Okay, tips. There's a whole bunch of new ones when I was checking this out, because the ones in the top left-hand corner, which look like old photographs, those are ones I own, and I've showed them off at many a workshop, and I got all excited when they introduced the ceramic tip and the metal tip, because those were cool. But now Ambutech offers all the other ones you see. Oh, except for the Bundu basher. That's just an amusing one that I like to look at, because that's used in Africa, in literally bashing your way through the bushes in urban rural Africa. The push broom one, I'm going to figure out what kind of application that is for. I guess it'd be for the kid who doesn't actually have enough arm strength to sweep, but it would clear a wide path in front of them. The hook one actually has a hint of swivel or bevel to it, so that when it hits stuff, it's not going to always, it's going to have a little hint to give. They had introduced a high mileage, harder plastic tip in their marshmallow, and then just this past year they introduced it as one of their roller tips. So that's pretty cool. I'm very much interested in this Dakota disc. I know that I had purported to kids that they're going to go camping with the parents. They should keep their giant ball and swap out their marshmallow for their ball when they go camping, because then they can jump over stuff. But the ball is still hollow, and when you hit rocks with it, it could break open. The Dakota disc, however, apparently is the solution to that. So I wish I had one in my hands to actually look at, because that definitely would be something very interesting. And then like I said, when you change all the colors of the handles, you now can have matching marshmallow hoods for all those ones. Okay, so here's some improvements. They did the white cane. The one on the left is the graphite cane. Graphite is nice and flexible. It doesn't bend as easily, so therefore you're not trying to straighten your aluminum cane. However, each of those little grommets, the ferrules, the insert tube, that is still made of aluminum and can still bend as I found out the hard way with my nice expensive graphite cane. But most of us are used to the cane on the right, the cheaper aluminum one. You can see this particular one, that the ferrold, the wider section that clamps down over the narrow section, has bit into it. Sometimes these canes are notoriously getting stuck together, and then the kids can't collapse their canes anymore. Solution. Here we go. So in the last couple of years, the folks at Ambutek have experimented with a slightly different one. Instead of ferrelling out the sections of the aluminum cane, they just created similar to their graphite canes, this little insert, and it's a little dome, and they even have a little spiral to it with the idea that if it does get stuck, you can give it a little twist in the reverse direction, and it should pop apart. Interesting. I had my hands on one in the last two weeks, and it was stuck, even though it was this style. And I thought, oh, okay, well, there's still drawbacks to this model. Then one of my students got a brand new cane and got this as the brand new end. So Ambutek, once again, they changed the style of metal, and they stopped having that spiral, grooved look to it. I'll check back in with my student in a while and see if after bashing around in the hallways with it, if it gets stuck as well. But this is Ambutek's attempt to improve the product, so I'm very excited by that. Okay, we've got nine minutes left. Susan asked, what about colored canes? So you can see on the bottom there's this red one. In context, having a red cane, my mother-in-law wanted this for Halloween. I know of others who've gotten an all-black cane because they wanted to look dressier for their grad ceremonies. They wanted to confidently march down the aisle, but they didn't want this big white thing sticking out and being the attraction. They just wanted to be able to navigate the auditorium with the cane that matched their graduation gown all black. Okay, great. And I know of a student who had one like the one that's on the top of the screen, where every segment was a different color. Fun! But remember, back to that Blind Persons Rights Act. In there, if you are able to download the Blind Persons Rights Act, what about white canes being two-thirds white? Therefore, the black one, the red one, and this multicolored one are not actually a white cane. And really, we have a hard enough time getting drivers to figure out what the person's holding at the side of the street when they wanted to cross. Some of them are like, it's a white stick. Hey, what's that stick thing? Oh, yeah. Some of them figure out that it's supposed to stop and give a little more extra time for the person to cross. But a lot of times, drivers don't. And now if we confuse them by having our kids with an all-colored cane that's not white, yeah, just not what I would recommend. However, if just the tip section doesn't have to be red, there's no law in Canada that says it has to be red. It was just a trend. So you can have the section at the bottom where the tip is to be gold or pink or whatever the kid would like. Here's some other alternatives. And here, the one on the left, Morrison had it in black and then added some decals to it from the Automobiles Department at the local Canadian Tire. The one on the right, we seasonally decorated it for Christmas time. Or if I'm not correctly, at Valentine's and St. Patty's Day, we put different streamers on just so that they can buy in and also gives them a teachable moment. You can add whatever you can during your teachable moments with the kids. And this doesn't have to be the O&M structure. It totally could be a TBI adding bling to a cane. So long as most of the cane is still wiped and drivers aren't confused, I'm good with it. Okay, going on to other trends. This was back in 1981 where one of the first buzzers for Crossing the Street for the Blind came out. Very exciting. People thought it was the best. In Canada, not so hot because we got winter. I hate winter. And winter takes its toll on our appliances, electronics and whatnot. So a lot of those buzzers end up not working so well. We have come a long way from the earlier ones on the right, as you can see there, to the yellow ones on the left. The yellow ones on the left also vibrate for the deaf-blind user. So it would, you press it, and then you press and hold, and it's supposed to vibrate when it's time to cross. And of course, the tactile arrow tells you which direction to go. So unlike the old days where there was just one button on the post, now they are trying to get them directional, so you know which way to walk when you're crossing the street. Here's an example on the left again of one from the States and then a different model also from the States. Those are from my travels around the U.S. However, there's talk about, this is a great article if you wanted to read it and be bored because if you're not an O&M instructor this probably doesn't mean anything to you, but this is a little abstract where they're researching different ways of crossing the street. I think this is actually one where I got the reference to using a white cane at street crossings improves your ability to cross. Anyways, it's there if you want it, you can find that later. Here's things that are trends that I've improved over time. Like LRT platforms, at least in Edmonton, have all got these truncated domes, the little yellow bumpy thing. They have that along the edge of the track. They've put that on all brand new LRT stations and then eventually they retrofitted all the underground ones which had been around for 40 years. They finally retrofitted those. It was unfortunate that a person who was blind died before they fixed that. Probably one of those catalysts to get it done, but they got all those done. They also introduced these priority waiting areas for people who have multiple disabilities, so that's great for a lot of access. Also, in terms of access that has improved over the last decade, the top one is the light up indicator on a regular bus. So as buses have been replaced over time, they now have indicators to tell you what stop it is. That one has the time. If I had waited a few more seconds, I could have got a picture of next stop at being 118th Avenue. The departure board below changes when it tells you when buses at one of the major transfer stations are coming up. So that was also exciting. Here's what applies to you guys. For those of you who are familiar with the essential components, it's an exciting document because it's one of the first ones that actually talked about how the O&M instructor is part of the whole learning team. Prior to that, there's that Teaching Students with Visual Impairments Guide 5, which was published way back in the 90s. And there was a chapter in orientation mobility, but it really wasn't very comprehensive and didn't talk about the need of having an O&M instructor as being part of that essential team. So the new document, and I say new because it came out after I was starting my training. I know it's, what, 13 years old now? But it was a great document to have to hang our teeth into. Sink our teeth into? Whatever the phrase might be. Anyways, if you don't know about this document, please talk to somebody who does. This is how you guys can support O&M. Aside from teaching people in schools and staff and parents, the Human Guide, which is the technical term in the O&M world, you guys all call it just side of guide, which is fine, I'll be with that. And then also teaching, trailing, protective techniques, room familiarization, all those things that all fall on the scope of what a TBI can do. If there's already an O&M instructor teaching what cane skills, you can reinforce all those lovely cane skills that we do. Hey kid, keep your cane in the midline, that kind of thing. Teaching them concepts about, you know, which is left and right, what is the front behind. All those are so super valuable to teaching them when it comes to street crossings. And getting them prepared to read maps, tactile maps. Those all help so much. We're going to talk about conducting environmental assessments and making recommendations and advocacy in the next slide. We just wanted a little brief reminder, like Kim said last month. Remember, if you're teaching white cane skills to kids, you would better be an O&M instructor selecting the right cane for them. That's the O&M instructor's job. Outdoor skill training, independent mobility training with the cane. Again, O&M instructor's domain and then assessing their O&M skills at that point. Again, O&M. So here, you as the TBI supporting O&M. Okay, the snow removal, real brief story. I remember we're a dad, junior high. He snowblows the driveway and the walk path and the neighbors all the way up to the bus stop area for his daughter every time it snowed. Beautiful. So if you as the TBI can support the parents doing that and encourage them to do that, that's awesome because that just, it took one less stress out of that kid's world. New construction of schools. We'll talk about that in a few slides in a second. Modifying existing school environments, which requires you to liaison with all those fine people in a school or school district. And this is just a small, funny point. There's one point one of my colleagues had tried to get an O&M contract for the school and the school board then went and got operations and maintenance to come out and see the kid. It was funny. So here, truncated domes. That's what these things look like when they're used on street crossings. They just help you align yourself and get across. This is in California. It also shows the slope as well as when intersecting sidewalks come along. Not so hot when there's snow, but in this case you can use snow to shoreline against as long as the sidewalks are cleared. Here's a little slide on helping your kids in winter. So you can review that later. There's tips on that. And if you go to our website on the RCSD webpage, I've got some of those posted there. Here are some problems with those truncated dome things though. Once you got ice pack on a street corner, now you can't square off very easily to cross the street because now you've got to jump over the hump. The left picture is an LRT platform. The one on the right is also an LRT platform, but of course it's covered in snow and you can't really tell the texture under your cane. So that's another hard part. Here, advocating for your kids in school, the bus on the left was one that my student who was visually impaired and was cerebral palsy and a hard time reaching and grasping with one hand specifically. That one bus was his. He had a hard time getting out of the bus because it was the opposite hand and also the contrast was poor. I wanted him to have the bus beside his bus, which was run by someone different, but it had higher contrast and it had two handles. So this required me to advocate for the kids, sorry, with this transportation department to get his bus, which was the gray one on the left, to add better contrast striping and install a second handle. Oh my goodness, was that a lot of work to get done. New buildings versus old. The one on the left is an old building and obviously bad contrast. The one on the right is Grant McEwen. Again, bad contrast, especially coming down. This one perspective going up isn't so bad, but coming down, it's just gray. So obviously the persons who were visually impaired in both of those pictures were going to have a struggle. Again, the one on the left is a brand new school built five years ago in Edmonton. The one on the right is a brand new school built up in a rural town in my zone and worse, the fact that there's a bad contrast on the right, but those steps, as you can see, sort of fall off. And I'm surprised the other kids didn't hurt themselves. This was another school that I served where they had a big common area where this is a big pit. So use a TBI, see your kids wandering these things and can trip. I'm more concerned about the low vision kids, of course, with these ones because the blind will use their canes. Here again, a music room with several tiers. And this one irked me because I knew the kid was going to have tripping hazard issues. Before he transitioned to the school, I asked him, hey, is he tripping issues? They said, oh yeah, last month he fell off one of these and hit his head on a xylophone and had to have stitches. That irritated me. So little advocacy, velcro tape, only took three months to get them to figure out who was paying for the $50 roll of velcro tape. But there, high visibility helps all kids, not just my kids, the visual impairment. Here again, you got those center posts, lots of kids run into these things, not just the kid who was visually impaired. Simple adaptation, easier to see. That's a $5 roll of tape from Walmart or from Princess Auto or wherever it was. And then sometimes I recommend to schools to actually mark those first steps on landings and risers. Some I had to write big reports to get them to do it. The one on the right, I just mentioned it. And my first visit by my second visit, that's what they did. All done, love it. Anyways, so your role would be helping adapting all those environments. Last slide, if you've got questions or comments, if it's not in your chat window, I'm going to copy my chat window so I can actually look at all your comments later. But if you have any questions you can email me. You can obviously visit the website that I mentioned that I have some of those ONM resources posted on. And again, here's a plug for the Canadian Vision Teachers Conference because there's more people who logged in now. We need volunteers. Stephanie and I are the co-chairs of the steering committee. Please go to that website and check out our conference. Right now it looks like we're going to be at Wessem and Tamal according to the website. But that will be changing as soon as Stephanie and I and the chair of the facilities committee make a final decision as to the venue. If you have any questions about the conference, that's the email to use for me, not my work one. That's it. I'll wait three minutes over time. Apologies. Well, I'll complete that talking now. There's lots of information coming there. Thank you very much for putting the time into creating that presentation and then allowing it to us all. So everyone have a great evening and we'll see you down the road. Nelson, there are a few questions that were sent. Perhaps those of you who did send them could direct them to Nelson and he can maybe respond back to the whole BFC. So via email you're talking Roy at a later date. Yeah, via email. Okay, thanks everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.