Device helps visually impaired experience eclipse through sound

Solar eclipse: Device helps visually impaired

A special device will help those who are blind or visually impaired to experience the upcoming eclipse.

AUSTIN, Texas - Hundreds of people across North America who are blind or low vision will be able to experience the eclipse in a unique way on Monday.

Allyson Bieryla, alongside a small team at Harvard University, came up with an idea in 2017.

"We were thinking, is there a way that we can create a tool that would make eclipses more accessible?" said Bieryla, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian.

The device they ended up creating translates light intensity data into sound.

"It's just detecting the changing levels of light. So as the moon eclipses the sun, the light will dim, the values will change in intensity, and so that gets mapped to a sound," said Bieryla. "So the bright range is a flute sound, the mid-range is a clarinet and then it goes to kind of a low clicking that almost disappears during totality."

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Over the years, they improved on the original design.

"We got a better light sensor. So we wanted a higher dynamic range because the change from bright sunlight to, you know, totality is pretty dramatic," said Bieryla. "The real big change was, putting in a MIDI board, a MIDI synthesizer board, so that allowed us to assign instruments to the sound."

They've also partnered with colleges around the country, including UT Austin.

The school held a handful of workshops leading up to Monday's eclipse where community members could come build a device.

"It's not just for visually impaired individuals to experience the eclipse, just because astronomy and physics requires you to rely on your five senses sometimes," Jose Saucedo, an astronomy researcher and undergraduate student at UT Austin, pointed out.

For example, connect the device to your computer and the data can create a light curve to be analyzed later.

"So even things like that provide ways for educators and people to garner a different experience of real-life problems that we try to approach in teaching," said Saucedo.

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The device also has an audio jack, so it can be plugged into a speaker or into headphones for a more personal experience.

"The biggest thing that I heard from a lot of blind or low vision individuals is they felt left out in 2017," said Bieryla, who said they got over 2,500 requests for a device before she closed the form. "I'm still getting emails, like, every day."

Bieryla said they are also hoping people will share their eclipse data with The LightSound Project, so they can use the data and share it online with educators or the public.

The LightSound Project website features a map of locations where devices have been distributed across North America. Each pin on the map has contact information for that location or event.

Instructions are also available on the website in multiple languages for anyone that wants to create their own device.

For these resources and more information, click here.