August 18, 2022
FEATURE
Seeing Chicago in another way with iPhone and iPad
Contributors of The Chicago Lighthouse’s Pictures for All program acquire independence, confidence, and artistic expertise
Adetokunbo “Toks” Opeifa loves exploring Chicago. She travels town unconcerned about shedding observe of a deliberate route, immersing herself in her atmosphere and capturing pictures of her environment along with her iPhone. “Chicago is a grid system,” she explains. “Even in case you get misplaced, you don’t actually get misplaced, you simply stroll in the other way and also you’ll find yourself someplace.”
Within the first grade, Opeifa, now 18, was identified with cone-rod dystrophy, a retinal dysfunction that causes progressive imaginative and prescient loss and lightweight sensitivity. This yr, she is taking part in Pictures for All, a program for youth who’ve low imaginative and prescient or are legally blind, launched by nonprofit The Chicago Lighthouse in partnership with town of Chicago’s Division of Household and Help Companies (DFSS) and Apple. Over the course of the six-week program, members have discovered technical images, coding, and career-readiness expertise, however most significantly, they’ve gained instruments to assist them navigate the world round them independently and confidently.
Pictures for All is a part of town’s One Summer time Chicago youth employment initiative, which gives folks ages 14 to 24 with internships and job alternatives at authorities establishments, community-based organizations, and corporations all through town. Since 2017, Apple has supported town’s One Summer time Chicago program by way of its Group Training Initiative, serving to create alternatives for youth to develop new expertise with Everybody Can Create and Everybody Can Code guides. This summer season, greater than 200 college students skilled alternatives in images, videography, recreation design, coding, app growth, augmented actuality, and extra by way of Apple-supported applications.
The Chicago Lighthouse supplied every of the Pictures for All members with an iPad Air, Apple Pencil, and Magic Keyboard to help their creativity. The iPad setup provided an expansive display screen with instruments to shoot, edit, and share their work. Many members, together with Opeifa, additionally used their very own iPhone to seize pictures on the go, seamlessly switching between units relying on their wants.
Apple consultants skilled the scholars on utilizing the digicam and images settings they would want, in addition to the accessibility options constructed into the units — together with VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in display screen reader, and Zoom, which magnifies on-screen components. For these utilizing VoiceOver on iPhone and iPad, Picture Descriptions out there within the Digicam app makes use of on-device machine studying to assist place a topic and describe the objects, setting, and folks within the discipline of view.
Whereas visiting the Adler Planetarium and the encircling Northerly Island Park for a ultimate day of taking pictures, Opeifa double-taps her iPhone display screen with three fingers within the Digicam app to zoom in as regards to her picture. “Earlier than I found Zoom, I’d simply maintain my cellphone up all the best way to my face,” she says. “This manner I can truly see higher.”
Opeifa has been utilizing Apple know-how since she was in kindergarten when her dad and mom bought the first-generation iPad to assist her learn her schoolwork digitally. She laughs at a reminiscence of herself working round her household’s dwelling in Nigeria a couple of years later with an iPad mini, excited so as to add to her assortment of Apple units. Having spent a lot of her life utilizing Apple know-how, she is comfy utilizing her iPhone to get a greater view of the world, and she or he’s additionally studying methods to edit her pictures on iPad. Whether or not she’s navigating from one nook of town to the following, or capturing flowers, town skyline, and every other snapshots of city life round her that pique her curiosity, Opeifa is hooked on visible storytelling.
“I like when photos inform a narrative,” Opeifa says. “This program is a pleasant start line for writing precise scripts as a result of I’m studying [how] to truly painting visuals.”
Opeifa prefers movie and tv as a visible medium to carry her tales to life, and she or he sees picture enhancing as a technique to hone her screenwriting expertise. “Screenwriting and enhancing pictures are form of the identical factor — particularly working with different people who find themselves blind, it’s important to be very descriptive,” she explains.
“I by no means get to see myself represented in tv as a Black lady who can also be a visually impaired, legally blind particular person,” provides Opeifa, who’s heading to California this month to attend Chapman College to pursue screenwriting. “Tv is a manner for folks to see themselves in numerous lights and totally different identities.”
Opeifa is only one of a number of Pictures for All members with daring, huge concepts for his or her future. Lance Gladney, who’s obsessed with pursuing a profession in artwork, hopes to supply his personal anime franchise. Gladney joined this system to experiment with a brand new type of visible artwork. John Johnson — taking part in this system for a second yr — is fascinated with electrical engineering or recreation design. And Alaula “Aihua” Sprecher is contemplating schools the place she will examine laptop science, physics, and astronomy.
Shelle Hamer, The Chicago Lighthouse’s director of youth transition, and Lisa Davis, the previous director of One Summer time Chicago who introduced the thought for Pictures for All to The Lighthouse, are excited concerning the progress each participant experiences.
“Confidence and shallowness are onerous — or I assumed could be onerous — to zoom in and train,” says Davis, who additionally served as director of youth employment at DFSS earlier than she retired. “However this program helped them open up and expose their confidence. It takes away the concept they will’t do that.”
An artist herself, Hamer has loved a four-decade profession equipping people with disabilities with instruments and training to assist them lead extra unbiased lives. When she and Davis launched Pictures for All 4 years in the past, she was intrigued by the prospect of how folks see in another way and specific themselves creatively — and noticed a possibility to make use of Apple know-how and Everybody Can Create sources to help that work.
“The instrument of images has an actual profit to folks with imaginative and prescient loss,” Hamer says, “from each the creative aspect and the useful. The entire youngsters really feel that they’ve expanded their capacity to really feel that they will journey wherever, go to locations they’ve by no means been earlier than. The coaching they acquired on the accessibility options out there on their iPhone and iPad has given them the boldness to navigate town and really feel unbiased in touring round unfamiliar areas on their very own.”
And that’s the overarching aim of this system, in spite of everything: supporting youth of their quest to be unbiased and instilling in them the boldness to take their future into their very own arms. “It’s simply opened the world for them,” Hamer says.
Press Contacts
Chloe Sanchez Candy
Apple
Apple Media Helpline
(408) 974-2042
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