Individuals who are blind or have low vision may feel hesitant to create art but can be successful when given the opportunity to participate. Working on creative projects helps program participants learn organizational strategies, develop tactile and spatial concepts, and practice problem-solving. The process can also build an individual’s confidence and provides a unique way to practice new skills to help them in other parts of their lives. In this course, staff from the Braille Institute guide discussions about art, define the terminology used by artists, discuss adaptations to help those who are blind or have low vision to participate, and provide demonstrations of two art projects.

This course is available for ACVREP credit only.

Course Objectives:

1. Contribute to a participant's sense of confidence.
2. Be a force of encouragement with your participant and help them build meaning in what they're doing through doing it together and kind of discussing the process.
3. We'll talk about transferable skills also cognitive skills that the participant will be able to pick up and enhance through art making. I'm sure you'll see that there's a lot of descriptive vocabulary which can be beneficial to learn and get accustomed to since that is a mode of communicating that someone is blind or visually impaired.
4. Also, through this all this articulating and describing and confidence building in the process, we really want for you to encourage and give a foundation for the participants to advocate for themselves and speak up for themselves and kind of decide what they need and what they enjoy.

The following are recommended screen reader and browser combinations.

Mac: Voiceover with the latest version of Safari,

PC: JAWS or NVDA with Firefox.

Note that currently, course quizzes are not functioning properly for Microsoft screen reader users with Chrome or Edge.

The course shows a start date, but this is simply the date the course was made available to the public. They are self-paced. So, there is not an end date. You can enroll at any time.

This course was developed by the National Research & Training Center on Blindness and Low Vision (NRTC) at Mississippi State University. We are the only national center funded to conduct research related to employment for people with blindness or low vision, and training and technical assistance for the federal Older Individuals who are Blind program. As a national center of excellence, we offer resources on a variety of topics for service providers, businesses, and persons with vision loss on our websites:

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